Nevermore / Katerina Canyon
When I was eight, my brother
would grab my hand and slap my face with it.
He’d laugh and say,
“Why are you hitting yourself?”
Peering at myself in the mirror,
I ask the same question,
wishing for blue eyes
when I know they are brown.
We are told we are eagles
when I know we are ravens.
The WASPy assimilation won’t take.
My hair kinks harder
with every attempt to straighten it.
It will never feather.
My lips are too large—
the teenage me was told
a hundred times.
My voice was the easiest thing to change.
I don’t say ain’t.
I harden my r.
It is a close WASPy assimilation.
People will talk with you
like you’re an eagle,
but their eyes drop in person
when they realize
you’re a raven.
I have been wearing this voice
for so long,
I think I have lost my real one.
When eagles die, people cry.
They mourn.
Ravens aren’t seen as dying.
They are seen as something
to be shooed away.
If they are killed,
no one mourns.
It is considered excused or justified.
I wish I could have my voice again,
but I picked up this assimilation
so long ago,
I do not remember
where I dropped my real voice.
Touch / Sam Calhoun
Wild clematis on the deck,
how it checks for light
three leaves like ivy,
how I mistook the oils
as poison for the skin,
how like me, only wanting
the sun across my body—
The Movies / at/om
There are movies coming out
that I had plans to see with
people who have been gone
for a long time. Movie releases
for series I have never seen
without my brother who lives
across the country. The next
Hunger Games movie that I
should be laughing about with
my dead friend. Upcoming
horror flicks I should have
laughed at with the people
I don’t talk to anymore.
It’s not that I ever had a problem
with going to the movies alone.
The problem isn’t that. It’s the
seats around me all filled with ghosts.
And they all talk through the previews.
Vocabulary Quiz Poem For Readers of Min Jin Lee / Ellen Ferguson
The Green Ribbon (Based on a folktale) / Brett Gastineau
A girl with a neck like a peeled willow switch
wears a ribbon of grease-stained velvet
tight as a hangman’s knot
or a stitch in a bad dream.
The boy sits with her in a room where
the wallpaper peels like a sunburn.
He asks, “Why the ribbon?”
She looks at him with eyes like cold spoons.
“Never mind,” she says.
Years pass.
The clock on the wall ticks like a dying beetle.
They grow old together among
the dust-bunnies and the smell of turnips.
Her hair turns the color of ash.
The ribbon stays green,
green as a stagnant pond under the floorboards.
She lies in the narrow bed.
The ceiling is stained with old tea.
The boy—now an old man with knuckles like walnuts—
reaches out with fingers trembling like a drowned fly.
He unties the knot.
“There,” he whispers.
Her head rolls off the pillow.
It stops at the leg of the bedside table.
Its mouth still slightly open,
surprised to find itself finally out of work.
Hope / Joy Johnson
"Hope! hope!" they say as the snow melts away.
Off they fly to summit thirty to praise
The words they'll utter into each other's
Gloves to carry away while pondering mothers
Left at home on bucket brigades. "Pray! pray!"
They might as well say as ice shelves dissolve
Into the sounds that escape through lips brayed
Where they worship how to make inequals
Of us and the world as compared to wealth.
But I am not happy -- I don't sing, don't dance--
Nature is injured, she feeds us all. Squelch
Delusions made to distract. Do taxation!
GGGM (the grouchy great-grandma) / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco
The grouchy great-grandma my cousins in Ragusa barely knew
They thanked me for sharing a photo of her in old age. They had known her, grouchy, in her 40s-50s. I had known her, grouchy, in her 70s.
She had a spice mix, way before a TV chef cried, “BAM” whilst seasoning his homemade foods from Louisiana. Her spice mix, “misturi ri nonna Melina” contains sweet, warm spices not usually found in Italian sauces. Some of the secret ingredients I am authorized to divulge are allspice, cinnamon, and…
MY THERAPIST SAYS / H.T. Reynolds
she’s never known a child who’s eaten dog food, let alone it being a supplement for missing minerals or vitamins or nutrients or whatever else my pediatrician told my mother when she took me in, face still greasy with kibble. She said it could’ve been the result of the empty stomach my father returned me home with that one weekend when I was still in diapers. Or from the snack cakes marked by Doug’s boxcutter so only animals would eat them—I wonder if they knew we’d cut around the gashes, learned how to spot mold spores early. Or maybe they just imagined us huddled along the trough too desperate to care—got a good laugh. I ask her what I could be missing—after all these years—why now? She grows silent for a beat—says nothing—that it’s always been nothing.
I feel the craving settle itself back in between my teeth.
Valley Undressing / Gabriel Phillips
Our eyes smoothed over the mountains
moving further to the left this time.
To the left was the falling breeze
the breeze did not break and turned
the fall softer than rocks.
What little bears fall from the cornea.
Do they see mamma bear licking
their wounds? Or do they wound
mamma bear to lick her wounds?
Neither peak has been touched
nor has ever touched at all. Tall
or short and neither touch. Mountains
poke holes in rivers with their canes
so they can see. They see me!
Like a surprise scab across the lips!
No more volunteering to be on all fours
unless the third and fourth are stronger
or more to the left this time. And that
mountain, the same one can be conjured
from the bottom of the empty coffee can.
Drink, drink. Push down the river, push
over yourself. Who stares until its pupils burn?
Clouds dissect the cornea
with bear claws.
