September - Poem 15
Blue Dressed Woman / Yael Aldana
There is a bar. We are there early
waiting
in semi-darkness, for a saccharine
band leader
so my son can set up and play
guitar, here, where
he’s too young to drink.
There is a woman, slight,
elf-sized, sloshing,
an overladen
mop. She too is waterlogged,
weighted down, bent over,
pressed down, the curve
of her back weighted,
pulled
downward
perhaps with life’s unkindness.
her dress swishes over her
calves, cobalt blue, polka dotted
with lively
cloud white flowers.
Fight back
I tell her.
a silent bubble in my
head,
Fight
back
When
she turns, I see a tiny
backpack looped over
her shoulders, jaunty
hope
promise.
Her mop chases our
feet. We raise them in
politeness. She goes
leaving the floor sodden
glistening moist.
Our eyes never
meet.
I’d rather be a poet saint and write devotional hymns all day / Catherine Bai
When Ammaiyar begged Shiva to release her
from her beauty, and all worldly burdens
I was exhausted by my surrender
to the man who hailed me on the street
and I was exhausted by my dominion
over the hairs on my bathroom floor.
Give me total power
or give me none at all.
I think you have confused me for a girl
when, actually, I’m the pupil in your eye
I do whatever the light tells me to
and you accept the world like a mold
accepts its plaster, forgetting that I’ve nearly
obliterated myself, just to flail around
in empty space. It’s exhausting to remember
that I’ll never ever be free, I can’t even
disappear, I can’t even fill up the earth,
when the distance to either pole
is the length of a cosmic universe.
Postcards Home / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
Dithyramb XV: for Jane Hirshfield / Kendra Brooks
To make sense of the world
First you must not get caught up in it
Avoid fads and trends and gossip
Instead find loose ends, grab on
And be willing to learn how things work
Together or apart
These connections help to make sense
Refuse to bend anything to your will
Resist taking anything for granted
Instead, notice how flowers grow
How a single seed holds a universe
Together and apart
See how the lopsided dandelion possesses
The soul and courage of a rosebush
Observe animals and their ways
How a horse lowers its long head
To water when it drinks
Rabbits are born blind
And survive on trust and community
Try to hold humans accountable
To the things that make sense
And question the incredulous acts
Together and apart
Follow any path that opens
Be ready to stumble and be afraid
Wisdom itself is still trying
To make sense of the world
I’m supposed to write a poem about the beautiful unicorn / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
of long-time female friendship, but I just had dinner
with two long-time friends, women I’ve shared
houses, adventures, books, and embarrassments with,
and something was different. We had sweet-potato soup
I double-checked didn’t have gluten, let them know
there were dairy pills for use. We sat too long
with numb butts at the dining table, scooted to the couch.
Our lives rhyme in similar arcs—parent retirement,
work trials, medical specialist referrals, strange pains
in the jaw, dreams about our teeth falling out. We used
to tell ghost stories over campfires, cry, goad each other’s
drunk texts, burn leftover wedding favors post-divorce.
What force is it that keeps us in orbit? I read somewhere \
if you’ve been friends for seven years you’ll be friends forever.
Nothing about this body feels forever, and the new fears—
so settled, sedate. After we ate and talked about our ailments,
they told me thanks for hosting, but it was late. I said
Thanks so much for coming all the way out here. It’s really far.
Drive safe. It’s dark out here in the country.
Diagramming Mrs. Dellmay / Yvette Perry
The message was already there when we arrived, en masse, from lunch.
Someone had written on the chalk board, calling her the b-word in large,
sloping, dusty block letters.
It had to have been someone from the Regular class, not the Honors class that now occupied half the 30 neatly rowed desks. We sat giddy with nervous anticipation, awaiting her arrival from the office where she was probably running mimeographs.
She entered,
greeted us, handed
a stack of purplish-inked sheets
to the first person, to be passed to the right and back.
We were slow to huff our daily lesson, all eyes on her.
Finally, she turned, approached the board. Adjusting her glasses, she regarded the words.
She picked up the chalk.
She drew a straight line
under her name (subject) and is (verb),
then separated the two words with a
short vertical line rising from the horizontal one.
She inserted a c between the th of the last word and added a period at the end of the declarative sentence.
Turning to face us,
she asked who could
come up to the board
to diagram a bitch.
Twice Removed from the Painting / Amber Wei
Bashful resonance replayed
unto the heart string’s nostalgia
no artwork can be the muse to which the
canvas is supplanted
the portrait is denied
For it was not enough
to get into the fair
with two coins
so I took my flower
hoping to charm the essence into giving
what would have been twice the
relationship renewed
And suddenly I felt life wasn’t enough to
have a night of aura
of hope lighting incense like a candle
and the blues subdued making its way
into a trickling soul, every verse where
it was leaving me
twice,
the pain
twice
the drama
Subdued there lay no arch in which the flag
could reach the moon
and my companion became
Mona Lisa
Für Elise
the gifted virtuosos
without a creator
and with all but the breath upon
which souls were defined
could recreate as the entity one could
embody as their own
