September - Poem 8
Still / Yael Aldana
The small brown bat is still caught the kitchen window
My mother sweeping him out the with her straw broom.
The black cat is still mewing on the forgotten porch
I am still sneaking him some milk.
I am still climbing on my grandmother’s bed
showing her my navy-blue school uniform.
Granny is still mixing me sugar water
Mum still yelling at both of us.
Mum’s hair is still mid back length
coiled in her corkscrew bun.
Mum’s still arguing with Miss Joan
the hairdresser to cut her mid-back hair.
I’m still in the garage still making a doll
swing out of a paper receipt and crimson thread
I’m still ruining my sister’s doll face with eyeliner
Granny is still making a straw from a pawpaw stalk
We are still blowing bubbles through it.
My mother still claps when she come upon us
Mum’s still telling me she did the same when
She was young.
I am still believing Mum was never little
I am still believing she was never like me.
Let the mummies rest / Catherine Bai
No one said you needed to make art
for consumption. Why take a photo of a mandala?
When you were born, you weren’t even allowed
to remember it.
Why did the ancient
Egyptians make the inside casings so
goddamn beautiful?
Well,
why not.
Why have one coffin when you could have
three? Why not put the loveliest one
at the center, and make the outermost layer
just lovely enough.
Time and space are overrated anyway.
Why not create something
devotional, for no one but the dead
to take home—
The Daughter is Nothing But Dust / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
This is how you lose yourself:
You are standing in the field
dressed in the same ragged hunger
your mother threatened to burn.
Never talk to strangers, she warned
but the taps have been dry for weeks now
and heat has loosened your prodigal’s tongue.
Her back is turned. She has been gathering bulbs
in the bright billow of her skirt since morning.
Even your mother, with her golden tegu’s eye
does not see him coming.
She doesn’t see your face when
he tears the fruit open with both hands,
holds it up to your lips like an offering.
In an instant, you are trapped
between the fire and the flood
then the ground swallows you
whole, seeds and all.
Oh mother, the truth is
I was curious about the inside
of the fruit.
It is so easy for you,
with your mouth full of flowers
but what was I to do with my thirst?
The land was so dry, and I have never been rain.
Now when we speak about water,
it is only a word. My name is that
which perpetually burns
a fissure in the earth
where all girls might fall.
I wish I had known then
what I know now:
There is no mercy among gods
for the thirsty.
The daughter
is nothing but dust.
VIII: Dithyramb for Dorianne Laux (cento) / Kendra Brooks
It took me years to grow a heart
Tonight I am in love with poetry
On the street outside the window
The moon is backing away from us
When the final piece is lifted and set into place
What if the ashes came down on us?
The pines rub their great noise
Such dumb luck. To stumble
It took me years to grow a heart
December 31, 1999 / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
There’s a gaggle in our living room. Light
buzzes in pixels from the square TV.
I am nine and have heard nothing about
an impending apocalypse as we watch,
gripped by the theatrical remake of one
from 1912. I think I’m on the floor, sculpt
of Persian carpet stamping my hands. Jack
and Rose slide from a broken stern into
the churn of ice-water. Sometimes a door
can serve a different purpose. Sometimes
a fiction of invented tragedy is worth
singing through. It was a legendary night.
Afterwards, we wrote our names in sparklers,
which, if you close your eyes right after,
can still imprint their trails behind your eyes.
This Poem Is ASMR / Yvette Perry
Existence / Amber Wei
What is art when I am
parched with paint
when turtles on the beachside of my creation
Come alive
And suddenly,
Art grows on me
To where it becomes not an entity at all
But a passion consumed by grief
Knowing that art is the yonder friend
Invisible
An invisible cloak
To where you are known by your paintings
And the artist doesn’t exist at all
