September - Poem 3
Kitchen Towel dress / Yael Aldana
I bought a dress that looks like
my mother’s kitchen towel.
On sale for $12.99 at Macy’s
with twirled pasta, fake red tomatoes,
a green flower burst of basil.
reminds me of her pasta salad with dill
torn from page 38 of Good Housekeeping.
reminds me her of 7-UP sponge cake
recipe milk splashed and copied
from her best friend.
reminds me of her Palella from page 24 of
The Rita Springer Cookbook.
reminds me of her black fruit cake
that shouldn’t go with cheese, but does.
reminds me of her black pudding
which I refused to eat.
reminds me of her mac and cheese
where Velveeta is the secret ingredient.
reminds me of making ice cream in
an ancient machine in the garage.
my mother would say it’s nay nay dress
that it looks like it was $12.99
that it should have stayed at Macy’s.
|reminds me of the cream colored
kitchen towel slung over her shoulder
her back to me, humming a song I
never learned.
I write poems the way you read them / Catherine Bai
No one told me it would be so easy
letting someone push me out of the street.
I didn’t even see the collision, I didn’t even
know it happened.
Their existence, I mean.
My eyes were closed when you showed me the wound
they were closed when you blew me a kiss
the kiss landed on my wrist like a slap, the skin
was a color I hadn’t seen before.
I looked beneath my fingernails and found it there
it was there all along, I never knew
you could live your whole life
without touching every bit of flesh
that was made from theirs.
Guava / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
For Kevin
seventeen was a bush fire
and you turned up like rain
I’d grown accustomed to being left
in unlit rooms, to not being asked
what do you want
what keeps you awake
what do you fear
what do you yearn for
in one of our letters, I asked for guava
to call my spirit back home
after seventeen years of wandering
after fleeing through floorboards
in the spaces between my parents
after clawing my way through
my grandmother’s mirror
to name the awful fear
of recognizing my own face
you squeezed guava pulp
with your hands, brought me
nectar in a blue bottle
still frozen in your backpack
despite the midday heat
all these years later, our house
is still filled with its fragrance
beloved, know I am still returning
through half-shut windows, through fear
through floorboards and
even now, in this guava season
you still call me back to myself
III: Dithyramb for Mary Oliver / Kendra Brooks
There’s a an otter in every poem:
brave at birth, boldness grows
in a sleek surrender to the cold,
a graceful strength beneath the water,
prowling with tiny paws
sniffing with a smaller nose
exploring life from well below,
waterproof fur that insulates,
and a sleek tail
to steer smoothly upstream.
Oh Fanny! / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Oh Fanny of Mansfield Park,
how I used to overlook you,
wish you’d stretch into some
other fetching Austen heroine,
the ones with wit and shining
eyes. But you of all of them
were fully realized, secret love
so deep no flattering Henry could
entreat you. This time, re-reading,
you enchant me—your needle
eye into false pride, the play-act
of sincerity. Who, dipped in your
clarity, could want to Marry Mary?
You the hinge of a brilliantly
laid irony, the key to that locked
gate, the unmade performance
we’re ever practicing and failing,
flailing always into the wrong arms.
Revival / Yvette Perry
The Poet asks me:
What will you do
when the drums begin to beat?
I know how I should answer.
I know I should say that I’ll be moved to dance,
to sing, to tap my feat in time.
I know my heartbeat should synch
with that of the drummers…
that my pulse should find
the pulse of ancestors
who once felt this same rhythm.
The Poet asks me:
What plantation
do you need to get up and walk away from?
I know she means a metaphor.
I know I should scribe a line from plantation living to
any living that is not fully free.
I know I should say I’ll leave thoughts
and rituals that no longer serve,
peel away versions of old-me so
new-me can be revealed.
The Poet asks me:
Are you breathing?
I realize at that moment
that I had not been.
(Response to prompts from Salaam Green, The Good Listening Project Community of Practice, 9/2/2025)
Technē / Amber Wei
The riviera was as glacial as the time
time froze itself
for all we saw to be the sunken village
mythical in its ability to float
above our baseline of perception
feeling that there is a pulse only
when intentional learning of
involuntary movement,
valves,
makes itself real
So the coastal riviera is a learned belief
for what is lost amongst the times
I floated above the plane of the
three-dimensional axis
to be able to relish the grapes of the vineyard
for the Mediterranean salt to tell me
it was not the location that embodied me
Rather, I fell into its arms
and time became frozen
because what was real
was the photograph that was taken
when the riviera became the myth
only my own years can tell
