October - Poem 7
Hungry / 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 the 45th Parallel, Meridian County Park, Wisconsin / Sam Calhoun
Eight hundred miles from home,
the only thing keeping me
from the fifth largest lake
in the world is a thin woods,
midway between places
I'll never see in my life,
though I imagine them all
like this, a small edge of land,
the water stretching for miles
to the horizon both ways,
Polaris midway to zenith,
the start of the little dipper,
the star that sits still, still
as a three hundred mile lake.
and me, here, cupping cool
spring water in my hand
in a roadside park, hemlocks
brushing sunlight like dust
beneath the day's rug,
how it shimmers on moss,
only eight hundred miles
from this waymark to mine.
Eight hundred miles,
and a road home.
after Life is a Highway and I am a Raccoon in the Breakdown Lane by David Dougherty / at/om
In the state of New Hampshire
driver’s education programs teach
moose safety as a part of the curriculum.
In 2012 they played a video specifically
about moose and what happens
if you hit one.
I have lived in New Hampshire
for almost thirty years and never
saw a moose, but I always wished I could.
I’ve driven backroads looking for them,
lived out in the sticks by the mountains.
I saw my first moose today on my way to work.
Moose are a lot bigger than most people think.
Even the young moose in Merrimack was well
too large to be mistaken for a deer. A grown bull moose
can easily stand over six feet at the shoulder,
it can weigh well over a ton. Moose are so large
they lack most natural predators. The safety video
said in large flashing letters
MOOSE HAVE
NO FEAR.
A moose in the roadway will rarely
run away. A moose in the roadway
is an obstacle. If your car was to strike
a moose the car would be destroyed.
If your car was to strike a moose it
would likely be fatal for both of you.
I guess luckily for the driver on 101A this morning,
the moose was not fully grown.
I guess luckily for me, the moose
was already dead when I drove by,
being removed from the median leaving
nothing behind but a pool of blood
to be soaked into the concrete.
I have lived in New Hampshire
for almost thirty years and never
saw a moose until today.
Most of the moose I have seen have
been in my drivers ed program or
pictured on postcards.
I will be more careful what I wish for.
At the moment I was serving a Pepsi upside down / Ellen Ferguson
At the moment I was serving a Pepsi upside down
To a professional bowler from the Bronx
Over by the Movieland where Apocalypse Now would play,
You were also near popcorn, more than once.
In the year I rode through the Great Salt Desert in the back of a truck, salt everywhere,
You were also salting something at the time.
This morning during Silent Ball, it was silent. You too watched something without speaking.
Glory be to all of us: finding signs as if they were.
For A. / Brett Gastineau
You come to me with your dark kindness,
putting your mouth to the wound of my body.
Your breath and detective fingers touch me from all around.
There is such exhilaration in the not knowing
where you are going and the ropes of scent
falling, falling down.
Let me be gripped in the claim of your hands.
Let them steal what has always belonged to them.
You remind me that the sublime is
something you sink your teeth into.
current / Joy Johnson
The dream I dreamt this morning became one pink streak in the dawning sky that paired with all the dreams looking for new sleepers to dissuade of the inconsequence of corporality. My drummer and I making what was inconceivably more fullfilled than any two could make -- a youthful blush on my subsuperconscience. How could community (radio) adopt this grander air, this anguished lyric of adulthood brought low to high, this felt need to leave a sigil floating in a melody through the currents of the world. Once I was a girl whose curling sheep hills brought someone low and I'm glad, glad.
Mischief Night / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco
Mischief night October thirtieth. Kids like me who would never dare vandalize so much as the cover of our own brown paper bag covered textbook with a doodle looked around the day of Halloween wondering how they threw those TP rolls so far up to go over all those branches? And if October 31st was a rainy day, what a paper-mache like mess. We were busy making costumes like my recycled can robot. My dad and I threaded half gallon cans from pineapple juice on my legs and little tuna cans for my arms, the guts of an old radio duct-taped to a box around my torso and a silver colored colander on my head. My mother crocheted orange wigs and americana primary blue and red rickrack costumes for me and a friend, Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. Only they weren’t raggedy since my mom carefully made each piece. I wonder if she started in July? The greatest act of mischief I recall was to eat most of the contents of my pillowcase of candy that same night.
MORE THAN YOU’LL KNOW / H.T. Reynolds
A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life
when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.
—D. Elton Trueblood, The life We Prize (1951)
I wonder if classrooms were arranged like rows
of corn, like peach trees—desks like drills
with the blackboard arranging the plots
outlining the caliber of each seed to be nurtured
or if Horace Mann dreamed of apples,
endless baskets beneath a sea of trees
professionally plucked and organized
or if Philbrick created blocks, sorted
them by age like wine or cheese, the nanny
holding her place as nurturer
while the kids learned how to obey
or if those seeds ever found a ridge,
an horizon upon which to bloom
to extend themselves to the heights
of stars and whisper back to the wind
thank you for your labor
for the direction of your push
for allowing me to land where I may
without burying me too deep
without denying me the rain
or if the gardener, tilling
furrows with calloused hands
hunched over an almanac
wondering if tomorrow
it’ll rain, or if the sun will be
cruel, or if there’ll be respite
from his labors, will find peace
beneath the scorching sun
knowing there’ll be fruit
tomorrow
One of Us / Gabriel Phillips
I still notice things. The lonely lemon river.
Your purple bangs belong.
From the mountain, cherries pour.
And over breast of hills. For
the harpies do we measure stiffness, with comb,
with posters in silhouettes,
decks of bridges. We come to knowledge
as a hammered gust. Without
time or the item to display, only
a stack of magazines with all the
smiles scratched out.
No idea of where we are
or if we are, we sing
out the rickets. Dancing under
a dying glow. Over the lake without
breakfast. We partially worry
with ruptured hands, the weight
of a hunted roar. How I trust your
comment on the stars, how you sleep,
how you forgot to
wake up. Between now
and noon we will open our mouths,
one of us will make room for
what remains of the shadow
of someone missing.
