September - Poem 5
The Ripple of Cats / Yael Aldana
after Margaret Atwood
There is a ripple,
a movement,
unseen cats? Leaves?
It’s as if
the leaves are moving
moving
by themselves.
There is also a smell
pungent,
also rancid
a smell of things,
old
dense, heavy,
a smell of
the forgotten.
It’s impossible to live / Catherine Bai
That’s it.
It’s impossible to live.
We might as well do other impossible things
like make the clichés new again and fall in love.
Not with each other, I mean
but with the whole, stupid world.
Lucid Dreaming / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
The moon is a single brushstroke
of titanium, a flick of God’s wrist.
The dog howls herself into thinning silver,
neck stretching toward the sky like
an unravelling thread of light.
Because I cannot howl, I am trapped
between the rooftop and the lower
atmosphere, fingers stretching
toward long lost sisters in the stars.
V: Dithyramb for Adrienne Rich / Kendra Brooks
in another change of world:
We the people, those of us suffering
the slings and arrows of outrageous
misfortune; we poor and huddled masses
enduring the injustices of fate and inflation,
thrust upon us like unwelcome greatness.
The damage is done, what treasures will prevail?
Persisting in this era of high speed tech
we no longer use an atlas for a difficult world.
The voice we heed is still that of a woman
(generated by AI). She tells us where to go
and how to get there as well as how long
it might take, and if we stray or change course
on the fly, she commands us to “return to the route”
Good thing some few of us can still find our own way
through Corralitos under rolls of cloud.
Poetry as Hazard / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Prof told us to have a handout and a metaphor for a poem.
I forgot we were presenting, but on cue took up the chalk
and drew wobbled loops on the deep green board. This is golf,
I said. There are 18 end-stopped lines that wind, a meter of pars,
rhymes of 4s, 3s, and 5s. Even, I beamed, a mid-course turn.
You should really learn the etiquette, but no need to be good.
So many ways to get into the woods, gritty sand, loss in a lake.
Make no mistake, I said, everything’s a choice—voices let in the head,
aim, an endless maze of counting, strokes of luck and duffs. Isn’t life?
I got an 80. Not bad for golf, but sort of sad in a class of poetry.
Criminal Order / Yvette Perry
I’m waiting out the final days
of our species bingeing procedural crime dramas
on premium cable channels.
I’m comforted by their theme songs,
opening credits list of actors,
cheesy dialog, and the way the team
knits together all the clues by the final act.
I’m soothed by the eight-by-ten photos of
raped women, missing children, mutilated bodies, and
arson- or terrorbomb-destroyed buildings
that the team pins to bulletin boards.
I eat my organic snacks and yell
warnings to the lady about to go investigate
the sound coming from her basement.
I verbally chastise the little boy on the playground
agreeing to help the man from the white panel van
find his lost puppy.
I joke/worry about the ads airing between
show segments for dozens of
different drugs with too-many-vowel names. If
I’m being accurately targeted, I am
depressed and overweight
with arrested bowels,
suffering from some species of mites
nesting in my eyelids
that I didn’t know existed.
Sometimes,
if I watch too many episodes too close to bedtime
I’m visited overnight by unsettling dreams where
I’m relentlessly pursued by
human-sized Demodex folliculorum
wielding axes in their eight pincers
and reeking of laundry scent booster.
In the morning after these nights,
my brain is fogged
and my reactions slowed.
I self-medicate with strong coffee and
worry what this diet
of mayhem and cruelty
is doing to me.
I wonder:
Is my viewing of these
shows a symptom
or side effect?
I wonder:
Am I escaping from
the age of the end of humanity,
or helping to usher it in?
Layers of Reality / Amber Wei
Is the Mariana Trench deeper
than your dream
for if it is the irreconcilable bout that
beats waves only to be met by the
calamity of the sea,
be frugal in the way you replace
the windowless plane with
a feat of engineering
Let turbulence be a refuge before
which you know not which eyes will
open from the sleep,
dreaming that someday the morrow will
bring a lifetime of irrevocable
hope
So let those days drown which cannot sustain
to the next day’s venture –
the floating plane
Gravity sunken by the
breath that immovable becomes the
airway’s trauma
Spindles form from the comet’s dream
of space,
cloistered by trajectory
Let the plane fly higher than innovation
so flight itself is smothered by depth
and the Mariana Trench breathes of
deep hydrothermal vents
Only to know that magma
drips from its depths
