The Witch / Katerina Canyon
Your green skin is kelp.
One sharp blink
snaps a picture of hunger
and the sharp hours you’ve posted
brooms to the moon,
charms to falling stars
that circled a twilight sun
to rise with the aurora.
We own our hunger
now that you have risen.
Who could stop you?
Our sorcery
showers the galaxy.
Everything is fractured,
and you have sung out of tune
several measures.
But it is the last day of October,
though the dead rise
with empty hands.
Your stomach was full
all of October,
when you shared your
wicked spells,
and I ate them,
and I smiled.
Draw Knife / Sam Calhoun
All night by the fire
I could hear the wood
smoothing itself to the flame,
how the grain curled
up and off like golden minnows
into the stream of night,
how the heartbeat below
in the pile of embers
never wanted to know,
how the rain hissed
at every touch, blackened
as if branding flame,
how the moon sees Jupiter
rising, and decides to set.
hangs like a draw knife,
dew dropping
in the morning ash
fogging the valleys,
soot fluttering
like the edges
of every winged bird.
Prometheus / at/om
Prometheus took fire
from the gods and
gave it to man, for
this he suffered dearly.
The gods, egotistical as
they tend to be saw the
theft of their power, even
when they gazed over
man and saw that what
Prometheus had truly
given them was warmth.
I never was a god,
I never was the kind
of being to create light
with my bare hands but
I sang it from my ribcage
and handed it out willingly.
Prometheus gazed on with
pride while I wrote poems,
and told jokes, and sang at
the top of my lungs while the
men who called themselves
gods warms their hands by
my fire until they were
clenched around my heart,
taking its light only for themselves.
Prometheus, I would give my liver to a thousand seagulls if I could have my fire back.
Not Nutter Butter...Lorna Doone / Ellen Ferguson
Your shapely hips, Nutter Butter, murmur their siren call, yet
something lower belongs to Lorna Doone
not the deepest reach/ near knees, actually --
Crumbs from Lorna Doone cross folded calves,
Falling from laps, less than tasty — like breadcrumbs almost,
Trails leading ... if only plays were only plays, not plates plating
All of it: doilies like antimacassars for cookies, like armor for fruit.
Parting / Brett Gastineau
We were standing by the coat rack in the hallway,
the air between us smelling of wool and onion,
just two bodies that had known each other’s salt
getting ready to step out into the grease of the street.
And I wanted to give you everything—
not just the laundry lists and the burnt toast,
not just the ordinary friction of our skin—
but the poems. The great, thick, bleeding ones
I kept in the drawer of my chest,
the ones I was supposed to write when
the world finally stopped shaking.
Let me sing them now before the door latches!
The poems with the marrow on them,
wet and red and trembling like a newborn calf
lifted from the warm slit of the belly.
The poems I meant to write when I had the time,
when the children were grown and sleeping
in their own beds,
when the rage went out of my hands
and left only the clean, white bone.
Listen—
they are piling up in my throat like unspoken prayers,
featherless birds beating their wings
against a cage of ribs!
The poems about the way your father’s hands looked
when he held the glass of whiskey in the kitchen dark,
the poems about the milk souring in the sun,
the poems about the exact, terrifying shape of love
that stays long after the flesh has turned to ash.
And now—
now—
we are saying goodbye.
We are pressing our mouths together,
tasting the iron, tasting the end.
And the unwritten lines fall down between us
heavy as stones,
heavy as the bodies we loved and buried,
leaving only the empty page,
leaving only the raw breath of what never
had the courage to become.
story un-telling / Joy Johnson
Freedom is the thing! — from morning pledgings
to founding fathers’ warnings ’bout taxing
without representing (to heck with
central planning, no wonder preterm us
was confederation) to anthems (w)rung
from sporting events — we’re inundated with
infinite tales unsung throughout a youth
thence ignorant of what’s owed: to slaves,
natives, the earth above and below, and
how freedom’s the wrong poem: we are one.
Then comes the imposition, onto all
we see and partake, of commercialism —
how our worth is beholden to our purse —
what power it can muster to coerce
respect — from whom? nonexistent jury.
Nonetheless, we’re pistoned back and to work,
chasing what we’re told we want, reassess
courtesy American Express constant.
Makes it hard to see co-denizens of Earth
as joys unbounded and congress priceless.
Then all grown up, we settle right in to
watch the news — a story bespoke not for you:
for the oligarch! I don’t want new wars
to watch/read/listen to. The germane ask:
who’s paying for the tuning to? who is
distracting us with the halftruths/untruths?
We’re being used — it’s no conspiracy —
it’s just concentrating wealth elsewhere, un-
fairly, monumentally un-so. Since
baptism, against fascism: need’s compassion.
Every contrived separation: a ruse.
Every moment on Earth: blind love.
Our duty to the story: the truth.
fox family / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco
Fox den along that curve in the trees next to the potting shed. Our dogs run, stand alert, sniff the breeze and run back to safety at our back door. Then we see the kits running and tumbling like a small circus act, twins with tails bushing out already, too young to hunt like their quick mother. One day, they are gone. Our dogs approach the den more closely like campers coming across spent coals of an old campfire. They sniff, run cautiously to the den and back, and return, tails alert, as we wondered and wished for a safe ending to the fox family’s story.
EXHIBIT / H.T. Reynolds
She never understood the nature of her body, why society insisted on covering it up lest she bear it all for some man’s pleasure. Not tonight. Tonight, she was reuniting her bare skin with the stars, that ancestral air, witness to every birth, every death, every great man humbled before a woman. The textured grit of the diving board bit into the soles of her bare feet; the cold steel safety railing hugged her bare thighs like an apron. She was tired of aprons. Tired of leftovers accumulating in a dirty fridge like tombstones for that little girl—another day farther from her reach. Tonight, she will live. She will spread her arms, offer her body to the dark—dive from the highest point she knew—that ink-black void beneath her. The last time she dove from this platform, hundreds of captivated eyes held their breath, hoping she would make it. She always made it. She unlatches the safety rail, secures it, and takes her position at the edge. She’s never felt so beautiful as in this moment, cradled in the moon’s timid light. She bends her knees, leans forward, and lets gravity take her. The air swaddles her bare skin; she closes her eyes and hopes the stars are watching.
Another Side of the Window / Gabriel Phillips
I love you.
Can you believe it?
To hunt you, to be found
by you.
When you sleep
I slide the tiny umbrella
under your arm.
It’s your umbrella too,
you know? We belong
under the same storm.
I do not capture the deep yellow smell
I capture what makes it yellow.
That I share the moon
with your moonless planet.
When the paper is ripe
I tear it out and show you
how to sink a boat.
Do you? Know?
And so
I throw the windows wide,
call into the dark
of the Salish Sea.
Who will step over this Hallowe’en?
Who reflects the light back to the moon?
when I say the first string, 1987, / Colin Sturdevant
I mean to say the first one was cut
before – before it could live a breath
of life and no child is a child at birth.
the first string, I say is 1987,
because it is still unspooling
like exhaled blue smoke
it is me
like exhaled blue smoke
on that day in Dallas after a funeral
snow pitifully hiding in pockets of ground
it is me
after the funeral of a 100 plus year-old aunt
a name not hitched to memory anymore
washed away by Jordan as if he was a river.
*
I cried city lines away, but not for her nor you.
For whom the fuck knows why.
Bare bottomed and loud.
An ether, a mouth unknown to itself.
*
I take the abuses, Jordan. For us three.
Nightly, I smell wine on her breath.
Nightly, I am re-spooled back.
I sob out a crown of falsettos until I pass out.
I am the string that stays.
*
Only time will tell how our threads recross.
