September - Poem 1
We Went Back / Yael Aldana
she went back there to the side garden
with the too-short coconut trees that wouldn’t grow
She found my gold bracelet, lost for forty years.
she sips her tea from the cup with
the pink roses, places
it in the matching saucer
I bring her a croton leaf. I found
it, present it in all its glossy yellow
gold waxy iridescence
my stomach sticks out too much with
too much roundness still acceptable for
a child, the rest of me matchstick
skinny.
It’s still years before people start
commenting on that too thick belly
those too skinny legs.
section off my body parts.
dissect me petal by petal.
Granny reaches for the orange brown
Leaf, coos her approval
she still in her pink pastel housecoat
that only I liked.
after Granny died, we all returned
to this morning. after
Mum died, we all stayed
there
together.
The City / Catherine Bai
Charles Simic wrote, “I tell you, I was afraid.”
I wrote it, too, every day
a flock of birds slipped across the sky and the pale blue light
continued to vanish as if nothing had happened.
Did I ever tell you about the time a friend picked me up from the airport?
Not my friend but someone’s.
In my teeth were nibs of wild raspberries I picked along the trails of Michigan.
He gave me a bottle of water, the friend
I was afraid I’d never see him again
Don’t go, I said, don’t go, as his fingers touched mine without a glance.
Summoning / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
I: Dithyramb for Linda Pastan / Kendra Brooks
When I think of Linda Pastan as I do
often after reading one of her poems
or when I’m not thinking about anything
in particular a line of hers will come to me.
Hers is a familiar and comforting voice,
one of the things I did not know I loved.
Hers is a music of departure which brings me
to the poets who came before, not the old
white men who take up most of the shelf
space in the library, but the lesser female poets,
the ones who pried open the windows
they wanted to jump from. The cigarette
smoking lady poets, smoking to stay
steady on their feet, pretending not to care
too much, unknown poets petrified with fear,
weighed down in their disgrace of attempting not
to leap and soar, typing hard on keys that stuck,
bleeding hope into their ink wells, penning
their souls like addresses on letters never sent.
Toiling daily in their craft, as if their inner lives
both depended upon and were afflicted by
poetry. Staying up all hours jotting down
the shapes of open wounds then laying bare
the scars that form from hiding them.
Girl poets –writing out of necessity and unaware
that poetry might be a panacea, a home remedy,
best served with a woman’s touch.
Part tribute, part celebration dithyrambic poetry is an imitation aimed to inspire and inform poetic experience. Dithyrambs were an ancient Greek form of poetry dedicated to the worship of Dionysis the Greek god associated with fruitfulness, theater, and ritual madness. My goal is to celebrate 30 poets who have inspired me on my poetic journey. Ritual madness here goes:
I’m so deep into Thai soap operas that I understand their references to other soap operas / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
and this is a sort of victory. I devour hours
of the actors, their porcelain skins reincarnating
across genres and temporal dimensions. On Instagram
I track both halves of the world’s most beautiful couple.
They exchange rings, replay their on-screen fling
as princess and princess’ bodyguard. Millions of followers.
I have learned ancient pronouns, about monarchy, religion,
astral planes, demons that lick you with whips to hell
and back again. I always up my Channel 3+ subscription.
Just $12.99 for six months of access, a portal to the fantasies
of the country I used to live in as a kid. I am wickedly
in love with senseless romantic plots, bitchy subterfuge,
even the funky audio boings and laugh cues, three back-to-
back instant replays of an accidental brush of lips. This
my Roman Empire, this my addict fix. This is how I exist,
pupils glued to the black tube in my grip as I slide
into unreality, delicious tragedy promised in dropped petals
of frangipani.
Dot / Yvette Perry
A little dot
between my middle and ring fingers
on my left hand.
First black,
then dark gray,
then light,
then recently—
sometime in the last several years—
gone. I hadn’t even noticed when
it disappeared.
Standing in line, obedient.
I wait for the teacher
to lead our class to the
Library.
I don’t hear what the
Boy says.
He’s looking as me.
His friends look at me.
They laugh.
I ignore them, my
mind alight with visions of all the books
I will check out.
The Boy points at me
with his pencil.
I shield my chest
with my folder
like battle armor.
The Boy pokes my armor
with his pencil.
He pokes, and he pokes, and he pokes.
His pencil, tip freshly cranked
with the tumbler of sharp steel blades
nailed to the classroom wall, pierces
my left hand between
my middle and ring fingers.
I’m sent to the nurse.
I miss our library period.
The nurse pulls the
pencil lead tip from between my fingers
with tweezers, then cleans the
wound with some liquid that
stinks and stings.
I tell her what happened.
She tells me, “Oh, that’s just how
Boys tell you they like you.”
I have the scar, a dot, like the name
(“Spot”) the Boy and his friends sometimes
called me, for decades.
First the dot was black
(sometimes the Boy would say “Black Spot”),
then dark gray, then light. Then gone.
I used to look at the dot
and imagine lead slowly releasing
deadly poison into my bloodstream.
I look at the space where the dot used to be
and wonder if the poison has been
completely absorbed.
Allegory of the Cave / Amber Wei
The voyage, itself, is the unmatched treasure
burdened by the voyager borne
upon times salt burned,
tasteless was the freedom
an unfazed muse
Abruptly standing at the helm
he put the compass in my hand, clutched
my fingers so that time was an intractable volume
surrounded by man’s integrity
Do not be lost though the wayward journey
is unbecoming of the lark you are
that sings in the cave of silence
the shadows you see are projections of
youth that lost you
Find winter, only to let the shortened days be
a cycle of dark mornings that find evenings
let darkness consume so
you no longer see silhouettes
In total coverings the world is more simple
because shadows are not real when
there is blinding light
or when the darkness of the night descends
so that no light can trick you into seeing entities
that require a pursuit of truth
to believe as real
Desert Notes / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
1: I asked Gemini about Sky
It is a truth unacknowledged but irrefutable that every desert is in search of its sky. After twilight, once the temperature drops, or the cacti resign themselves to another blackout of punishing heat, the skies flee in search of an elsewhere, leaving stars all a-quiver, Andromeda’s ebullience outshining the Milky Way, and the Milky way lost, jaw-logged, pretending it holds the same night-sky.
Every night, the palette is gigantic, a coalescence of indigo and lapis blending into darkness always and already unrecognizable. Was there yesterday, or the day before, or a year from now any real chance of verisimilitude?
Perhaps you’ll shake your head, looking up, lacing your eye to a sky that blooms with the same (you assume) unmistakable candour. But sky isn’t one. And never is it the same. Which is why the desert it looks on, is never the same desert.
Of the flightiness of stars, you’ve already heard. Bring back to life the pyramid builders, the giants that heaved dolmen and menhir on shoulders that almost touched the heavens. They’ll most certainly lose their bearings. In vain they forage for the treacherous Pleiades, their long-dead flares travelling surely but imperceptibly against ancient firmaments—
From ‘firmus’, meaning ‘strong’, ‘steadfast’, ‘enduring’.
Imagine, then, if they were to discover that firmus is plural, restless, ephemeral, always and already moving. Perhaps then they’d start to understand what it’s like to be a desert.
Or a dune, morphing with the wind.
Not the eye, but the memory of sight.
Desert as yearning. As desire. As inexorable want.
And its skies, always and already
lost——
