October - Poem 8
Newborn / Katerina Canyon
I saw
your eyes open on the video screen
at the sound of my voice
like the first ocean wave,
sleepy
from swimming through
the channel
and your home of
nine months.
I know you.
You said
with your eyes,
turning over every
syllable of my voice
for some sign of where
you heard it before.
Your ears know grandmother
from where you are
to me,
3,000 miles away.
You said,
I know you
with your eyes,
knowing the vow
in my voice
that your
home starts with your mother
and continues
through to where
I stand, arms open,
promising shelter
and a home
where all children laugh.
And
why are you so far away?
You said
with your eyes
open like an oyster shell
before the first wave.
Where are you?
I will be home soon.
Late On The Mississippi / Sam Calhoun
A distant loon calls
echoing every barge,
I sit on the pier edge
past the breakwater
where every stone
chokes on waves,
how they seem shallow,
distant, old lives
remembering once
how it always was,
the power to be heard
coming in a flurry,
notice how the current moves
like swifts toward no chimney,
red sky at dawn breaking
every horizon,
the murmurating rain,
still dark, hopeful,
rolling like scud clouds
through Andalusia Slough,
rushing against the banks,
released back as if longbows
bending toward home.
Tanka for the Starry Eyed Fawn / at/om
Born in a bear trap
trying to stay starry eyed
sinking my teeth in my leg.
This skin was so beautiful
but I never stood a chance.
Salty Cat Fan / Ellen Ferguson
For Halloween I go as a salty can fan --
The salty cats are a band.
I carry salt, a cat and a fan.
One year, I want to go as something else –
Maybe a house of cards.
You could come over and work on me
Until I can stand on my own.
Silence / Brett Gastineau
Silence is sweet and holy.
Silence is the language of snow.
Silence is like the love between strangers,
a grace upon the heart’s meat.
Silence is the practiced mathematics of clouds and ice.
Silence is where the beautiful is found by accident and
where one come to believe it might last forever.
Grief comes with the rattle of rain;
it’s smell lingers and won’t let go.
The warm luminous water of memory becomes a mystery,
a vague fractured religion.
Thoughts drift, find no place to land,
hover like flies over the wound.
The tender and the cruel can make no peace.
And what is silence now but a wild hunger.
unskilled labor / Joy Johnson
open sign flashing, comrade
come home with me, comrade,
make me your friend
we upend the way of polity,
me and iamyourcomrade
bricks subtend
a world-changing
scheme. us comrades,
we watch the world changing
try to stay with the plan,
not comrade freak comrade
what can i
contain here
i need more comrades
to maintain me
beans on toast, comrade
be of good cheer
Who Knows? / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco
The Beatles’ song I Will was one of my favorites. The Beatles had a resurgence in popularity, sadly, when John Lennon was assassinated at the beginning of my 7th grade school year. I vacuumed and dusted wearing my WalkMan while working out the harmonies in the song. I didn’t know yet that I would get to know I Will so well, I would audition with it and successfully join the Alto I voice part of an a capella group I sang with for seven semesters. That’s because I took the advice to wait and watch the first semester of my freshman year to absorb the activities then plunge in by January. We reunite after forty years in February 2027. The world took my life’s activities for those four decades and swallowed them in one loud gulp.
I REGRET / H.T. Reynolds
putting the keys on top of the microwave
the butter dish three inches to the right
of where it usually is, or the loose screw
in the cupboard I never fixed
the cracked tile in the back room
when Larry convinced us all he could
still juggle bowling balls—our only
shared sport, a basket full of ten-pounders
collecting cobwebs and dust like snow
I regret not shoveling the driveway
when I still had my gloves, my scarf
not quite a noose—
Who Begs, Begs to Differ / Gabriel Phillips
Tons of sheets with 100 thread count. Yes,
they wrap the feet because of thread count
not the experience of counting.
They give bricks to one person at a time,
in case another person is sleeping.
How do you know they are cannibals?
When the child was myself, I was
the grave robber and his grave. Neither
dead nor grieving but very much
an appropriate blessing. Long have
I gathered anything that bends.
And bends towards me.
If the sky detaches, does it turn black?
Roam, roam how Romans fell.
Actual inventors of color. In front of
the canopic jar, in front of the bathroom.
Muddy makes mince meat fresh.
Muddy is the golden. Let the goose
cook the chef.
Are you sound?
I am lengthwise. I am both stumbles.
I share my sleep (one is mine)
around the yellow wall. Even in fever,
never with skin and flavor, I reverb
with floating feathers. I will never catch
what can never fall.
Pluck / Colin Sturdevant
-inspired by The Odyssey’s scene of Odysseus devouring a lotus from Calypso.
at the lip of the earth.
I tugged whatever shell
I could strip from
succulent flesh
to discover
I was playing
a lyre.
& to what I had sensed
was a lyre
were dilapidated perennials
long forgotten yet sought after.
each mouthful was a bloom
I took in:
a memory eroded.
my skin becoming kissed
by long daylight & sea
& such a way until I return home.
