October - Poem 6

At the Bar / Katerina Canyon

I think of Harlem’s street noise

as I sit alone in a sushi bar in Jakarta

observing little beyond my own thoughts.

I like to sit alone listening

to instrumental music

while the sushi chef slices soft tuna

with his bright steel knife.

The slices sound like a whisper.

The sushi chef speaks

and asks how I like my sushi.

I say it is good and how as a Californian

I maintain high sushi standards.

He tells me he used to work

in California.

He was a permanent resident

but is not allowed to return to the U.S.

because he stayed in Indonesia

too long, taking care of his dying mother.

I think there should be more to this—

a deeper meaning, a greater truth.

I have no solution for him

or this world we find ourselves in.

He gives me his card to contact him

in the future, but knowing me,

I will forget about it

and move on to the next poem.

I think of Harlem again

and remember that there are people there

I haven’t seen in over a year.

At Calumet Harbor  /  Sam Calhoun

Cold night at Calumet Harbor, 

far boats eddying to the marina,

my fingers drifting across the tower 

railing as the diurnal wind 

stretches like an old blanket, 

threads just beginning to break 

into small white caps across 

the breakwater, each rock

sipping sky like news of the day.

Behind us the harbor lights, rhythmic,

know how long to shine, and flags

become their own shadows,

a static whispered through the night.

Here a sky can break so hard 

it needs the moon to keep going.

I remember how birds face windward

so they know which way to lean,

their feet gripping cold wires, 

their bodies spaced apart 

to stave off the electrical 

current underneath.

Atop the cold tower I lean in.

If memory is a looking glass, 

any life can be this lake. 

I close my eyes, and listen

to the engines of dreams.  

American Horror Story: American Horror Story  /  at/om

We as a society 

have moved past the need 

to keep watching 

American Horror Story. 

Like it’s bad enough to just look at my phone every morning and see all the bad news, 

that there was another mass shooting in another state where my friend lives, 

that some old fuck elected into office a 

thousand years ago wants to ban my 

god given right to use a public bathroom, 

that there’s a superstorm forming on another coast where it previously never rained, 

that I couldn’t afford to go to the doctor but my tax dollars are funding weapons, and tanks for cops, and tear gas, and kidnappers in the street, and islands and gold courses for evil men in positions of power. 

So the last news I need is that I’m going to have to watch, 

Evan Peters still playing that seventeen year old ghost, 

(that yes had me in a chokehold when I was also seventeen) 

but we’re both far too old for this now. 

And this show has gone on so damn long 

and the plot has somehow been lost for longer. 

But I guess when America is always making new horror stories 

We have to punish ourselves somehow. 

Carpe Diem-y  /  Ellen Ferguson

You can have my Samuel Beckett and Edward Gorey book

But I’m borrowing a day today.                         

                                   You can have my Roz Chast portrait of Jonathan Richman

But I’m taking today for a walk outside now.

                                   You can have my Kafka T-shirt and my Easily Distracted T-shirt

But today and I are going out to play catch with a tennis ball.

                                   Those are the only valuable things I own. Consider them yours.

Now, today and I are making molasses cookies. Later, Hater.

Spark /  Brett Gastineau

The invisible hand reaches from the quiet cold

and places two embers in the mouth of a corpse.

The honeyed light grows and sprouts.

Her skin remembers what it is to be alone.

She breathes in the moon air teeming with laughter

and whispered affections.

Her heart—that bloody star—pulses with the beauty

of thunder.

The fire spreads with the softness of April meandering

through tendons and bone; its strange music

weightless as a shadow.

The refrain flowers as does the language in her heart—she

knows them as she knows dreaming.

She feels her legs like snow.

As the sun rises, at first, it obliges them to glisten

and then it makes them dance.

Her feet upon the dark earth,

she sets off to write her new myth,

to find what her questions are.

Forgot  /  Joy Johnson

In the midst of memories of the him

Who placed his palm against my sternum as

If to heal every broken bit within 

This frame, when you say 'hi' and then insist

There was a day when we happily sinned:

Each other's arms, mouths.  A day of passion. 

Perhaps when I was a drunk bassist in a band?

Oh-- I knew your brother from shared classroom. 

Embarrassment.  What is your name?  If only

We were young and could go at it again. 

Hope might spring up in the form of forgotten 

Betrayal (whose trace endures doggedly). 

Let it fade … replaced with you and me ablaze. 

Instead we kissed until I turned away. 

WITH THIS BEATING HEART /  H.T. Reynolds

tender beneath her teeth,

these minor moments

chambered & dislodged

like a grease fire

becoming aware,

choosing not to destroy

what frightens me

but don’t tell me

what I’m not—

this heart’s

heavy burden

Until the Street Lights Come on /  Gabriel Phillips

Dad showed me a bicycle

that had chased a cat into the tree.

He threw rocks at it until dinner

then we ate the tree.

Last I saw, the bike was skeptical

but didn’t rust. Since it didn’t rain.

I studied broken bicycles against

the tree’s permission. It wanted longer

pedals on shorter bicycles. It didn’t

want sap to erupt. The garage

had closed for winter. Rubber

was not on sale. So I promised

the dirty bicycle, that if he leaves

he will never be clean.

My father threw me at the bicycle,

one final time.

He visits me the last of every winter

and checks for signs of rust.