September - Poem 14
Mi Gente / Yael Aldana
My soul sparkles like stars. I was a nowhere girl with no past. pero mi sangre trae las pistas de mis orígenes (but, in my blood are the clues of my origins). I am driven, like a donkey running with her ass at the whip to find them. La mayoría de mi gente está muerta, pero puedo descubrir sus huesos (most of my people are dead, but I can discover their bones).There is one that might still live. I want to find her before she passes from this world. If I am too late and she is lost to the ethers. I will be content to find those with her blood porque también es mi sangre (because it is also my blood).
I was too late. . .
Astoria is another word for paradise / Catherine Bai
apricot / fig pear / hibiscus / rose
sunflower / hydrangea Japanese maple
persimmon pomegranate / gingko
red and white string on a cherry blossom tree
racoons by the water / Canada geese
Oh, but how I miss the loquats outside their native soil
the baby alligators behind our snaking road
green apples shipped cross-country to the nearest grocery store
the beach is alright in Brooklyn, but oh
how the cool riptides pull me home—
Even If They Never Loved You / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
There
is a
line
drawn
from
earth to sky
of mothers
who loved you
before you were born
before your name
rose into the air
in baptismal
smoke.
You
Were
blessed by hands
you could not see.
You are gold
and blood
and salt
and
water.
You are
love and
love itself
before
its name
was
Love
XIV: Dithyramb for Kay Ryan / Kendra Brooks
Who would have your mind
if they could help it?
Not a dangerous kind
of a mind, hardly
but the kind of a mind
that gets run off
for imposing
its cunning charm?
An ethos untamed
in an unnatural frame
but not shunned.
Jokes unexplained
except by the sound.
Like erratic facts unpacked
and shrunk down
to slip through the cracks.
How on earth do you manage
wearing the brand
of the kind of a mind
not enough in demand?
XIV / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
At his interview, the great poet
said a sonnet can lose everything—
It can lose the rhyme, the timing.
It can even divorce the love note
theme. It can get rid of all these,
he mused, philosophically, except,
he claimed, for the number fourteen.
Instantly I felt a pang. Dejected,
I wished his pithy quote had turned
out of its insistent numerological
bent. That day I’d spent astronomical
energy wrestling fifteen lines to earn
the term. He had, this beloved master, smashed
my art, and made it move a little faster.
Bereavement Leave / Yvette Perry
For today this is all there is:
these hugs—deep breaths
inhaling Cinnabar,
hands rubbing and patting backs,
eyes closed against tears,
a whispered
I know I know baby I know
Tomorrow: stories
told and retold
so many times that punch lines
are recited in unison,
laughter so strong
that sides stitch
The day after,
Real Life
will demand adherence
to the Rituals
of the Mundane
But the black sheath dress
needing to go to the cleaners
remembers, releasing notes
of clove, jasmine, cinnamon,
and vanilla,
still warm from hands
and sounding like hymns
Ages to be Remembered / Amber Wei
Why were the listening years
substitutable
for the imagination of the
entrapped fidgets of the
collection of memories that
perplexed the handles upon which
stories become abridged
epochs
let there be a consciousness to
which a tale remains
the wandering child knowing no
remorse to the introspective
wonder that took
ages to be removed
withdrawn
was the story that
the admirers of passion
became entranced by
the desire to believe
and find me in the midst of the seaweeds from
the ocean depths looking
to find a fish make its way
through the maze of reality
shaped to gain traction of challenges
