September - Poem 10
Marriage / Yael Aldana
There is a picture of us. In your parents’ front yard in St. Albans, Vermont, in bathing suits. Yours shorts, yours blue, mine black. You are sitting on a metal folding chair, feet in a blue kiddie pool, me sitting in the kiddie pool. I am getting fat. This is what I do in relationships. I thicken like albumin.
Explain this picture to me.
Why the fuck are we sitting
in your parents’ front yard
in a kiddie pool? Not even
a regular-sized pool
But one of those extra
small ones with orange
goldfish.
Your hand is on me protectively.
I look vaguely annoyed. Are
we happy?
Yes.
Relationship goals.
In Love / Catherine Bai
You touched my brain stem
the day you kissed me
when I watched Patty Chang making out
with her parents I thought it was
breathtaking. Ewwww,
you said, when you realized they were
eating an onion. It was raw
nerve that made me cut my neck
open to you. Why did you
sew me back in reverse
and suck up all my tears
when all I asked you to do
was share an onion with me.
Walking Home / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
After he drove off
the road unravelled
wet and empty before me
each house shut against slanting rain
Shoes bloomed with mud,
each footstep an ache for home
Notebooks bled through
backpack, through white shirt,
down the insides of wrists
into clenched palms
Still the road unspooled
step by step, its silence
urging me to keep walking
through the chill
still, not cold as the fear
of his return, that next time
he wouldn’t take no
for an answer.
X: Dithyramb for Sylvia Plath / Kendra Brooks
It’s hard to listen
when none of the voices
telling you
what to do is your own.
You hear yourself
being described
but not as the self you know.
You don’t recognize yourself
in the shadows that you cast.
–Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas
The creases of nuance and wrinkles of time
evade you in photos.
Under the generic shades of grey,
your hair dulls
to match the color of your eyes.
It’s like there’s distant music playing
but the words are muffled
and the song escapes you.
Or maybe you have escaped
–off to dance with Ella Mason
and her eleven cats:
finical, stentorian, wild-cats.
Coincidentally / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
In grad school I shared a house, and one
of my housemates was named Moken.
When he learned I spent winter break
in Thailand he asked if I had ever met
a people called the Moken. He’d learned
about them on Wikipedia, Googling.
“That’s a crazy question,” I said. It was
like asking, knowing I’d lived in Texas,
if I ever ran into Chuck Norris—which, no,
I didn’t, though I did pass near his ranch
in Navasota on the way to golf tournaments.
“There’s no way I should know this,” I said,
“but, yeah, in fact, we visited a friend
who does wellness checks on the Moken.”
I told him about mopedding the sandy edge
of a southern island. Across spanned
a rope-pulley drawn raft which took us
to a tiny village on the Andaman.
The Moken kids swarmed us, shook our
hands, toured us around their bamboo cabins.
They dive so often that they’ve learned
how to see underwater with precision.
I hadn’t known before that Christmas
of the Moken’s existence. I think of this
stranger I lived with, the coincidence
of a name, the arbitrariness of caring.
Misunderstanding / Yvette Perry
For the longest
I thought she said
I was the apple
in her eye.
How painful
that must have been
to have a whole
piece of fruit
blocking your vision
rubbing against
your inner eyelid
irritating your
cornea. So I stayed
as still as I could to
cause as little
discomfort as possible,
as small as I could
to alleviate agony.
Then later when
I learned it was of not in
I’d been too still and too small
for too long
to make the adjustment.
Origins / Amber Wei
Where was the time unsheltered
find home it yearned
and brightness became a
blaze of measure
daylight
Seeping water from the river
bringing gleam to the glen
And where was it
the dream
of a breath
where the sun always shone
and color curves like
the befriended light
Come closer, the whisper
became a voice
and the mountain heard and the
larks responded
For angelic song
was the muse that made
the birds sing
and the glen calls
for the day to be new
as the mountains part for
gushing waters to flow
The Two Ladies of Provence, Part 1 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
Still-dawn on Rue Frédéric Mistral. A black dog emerges from the near-light. Followed by nine
men playing flutes and tambourines. They walk past the bakery and the tiny corner café whose
name is a diminutive of the town’s – Le Petite Moustieraine. A disconsolate music is drawing
open the wooden shutters, the half-naked forms of disturbed sleepers peeking from behind blinds
and balconies and open windows.
At the very heart of the village, a cascade disgorges its water in a persistent ush and
rumble, blending with the notes from the réveil and lingering further than the ten shadows who
climb higher and higher into the skies, up the two-hundred and sixty-two steps where the chapel
of Notre-Dame de Beauvoir is perched between the open jaws of the canyon, the fourteen
stations of the cross succumbing to the grandeur of three giant cypresses, like portals to the in-
between. All these years they’ve been engaged in a contest with the steeple and the rockface
where the golden star hangs precariously against cloud and storm, chained to the cliffs by a faith
stronger than myth or martyrdom. Every night, a spotlight from the clock tower in the village
square washes its ten points so that even from afar, as you cast your gaze across the crested
valley, you’ll catch the faint twinkle of an omen.
Every day at the stroke of five, from late August until the eighth of September, feast of the
nativity of the Virgin, the dianaïres, or musicians, awake the disconsolate tourists, watched by a
rusty harvest moon, the same moon that would have cast its light on that early morning hunt
when the goddess, armed with bow, quiver, and an invincible beauty, would have vanquished the
starlight with her ravenous hound, teetering between this world and the sanctuary of the dead
Diana, moon-goddess, protectress of childbirth,
dressed in blue and a constellation of stars.
