September - Poem 16
Twelve Years old / Yael Aldana
I dropped my purse under
the bleachers
of the traveling circus
Tammy’s lone white socked
foot hangs down
me under the bleachers
looking
shows me where
we were sitting
where the wayward purse
might be
where I’m going.
when I walk down the hill
to ride with Tammy to school
I think of mongooses
I see one run across the road
or maybe I imagined it
I don’t remember.
I go to Tammy’s house
to listen to her comedy record
Her mother is bathing her
fourteen-year-old brother with
Cerebral palsy on their back porch
that sits on the beach
His legs crossed
s blunted attempt
to hide his bare flesh.
His mother walks away
I don’t know where Tammy
is. I look towards the ocean
An eagle ray swims in the shallows
The tips of his wings break the surface
I don’t know if her brother sees
what I see.
Nights Before Lexapro / Catherine Bai
I was the incessant ringing of a telephone without the telephone, I was the glow of a computer screen without the computer, I was the impossible instant before a sound is made. When did I learn to turn pure potential into a steel trap, to make freedom into a fossil? When did I learn to lure the future into the very breath I’m breathing, to fish the past from the safety of having happened into the possibility of happening? I wish I could describe what dread is: the absence between the past and future that supersedes the present.
The Secret Life of Milkweed / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
Since we are speaking of plants, let me ask you about milkweed.
Last week, I brushed its leaves and a current tore through me
fingers to crown to soles and back again. I was barefoot in the dirt,
baby balanced on my hip. Was it the soil, some invisible chemistry
of burrowing creatures? Static in the charged dusk air? Or something else
a language I almost understood
I searched for it: tropical milkweed vibrating, magical properties of milkweed.
The internet offered only butterflies, wing-deep in thirst.
How do we know when something is magic? When it answers us back,
or when it leaves us even more hungry?
In the yard, buckets of animal dung ripen to soil.
Banana peels, eggshells steep in glass jars of rainwater.
Under the full moon I make rings of salt
for my loved ones to stand inside. I never told anyone this,
but when my son was new, I wanted to lick him clean
the way cats baptize their young
as if my body held the last true water.
By morning, the bucket of milkweed had toppled into mud.
Each stalk bent, waterlogged, the flowers gone slack.
I lift them, repack with soil, pour rice water,
lay down a bruised slice of fruit, a few strands of my own hair.
Maybe devotion is the only magic:
to keep touching what withers,
to keep coaxing green from what is already gone.
XVI / Kendra Brooks
In the silvery morning air,
In the foggy, melting mist,
The spreading light is carrying
off the dread of last night’s emptiness
Being without you through the night
is not worse than finding you
gone in the morning
in this place where beauty lives!
Transference / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
I have poet friends who bemoan that poems
don’t use metaphors anymore, that metaphors
are a dying breed. But really, sometimes
I just don’t want to satisfy the verb to be.
And anyway, what about all the other ways
words are little vehicles? Linguists will back me.
I remember reading George Lakoff’s seminal
book. How he explained the profound conveyances
prepositions make. The tenor of feeling
you can express by saying you’re up or down.
In English we’re spoiled with these little things
linking the unending boxcars sentences are.
Somewhere deep the brain still takes the dead
trails of metaphors, my old prof Haj, a friend
of Lakoff’s, used to claim. Haj died this past May.
I never knew why we called him Haj. His given
name was John. He, too, was a journey.
Recipe / Yvette Perry
Do you remember when you tossed me
the egg and I moved aside instead of trying to catch it,
and that was not what the other girls did, so as a result
you knew you wanted me to be forever yours? How
young you then were, and how utterly uncomplicated,
to make a major life-long decision based on splattered
yolk and albumen and shattered shell. How
foolish I’d be now to doubt the longevity of
such straightforward discernment. And how lucky we are
to hear echoes of our vows whenever we make a quiche.
Polygon of Light /Amber Wei
Wooded darkness, the light only reflects from
½ of the trees
Haunted hallowed truce
the panoramic expanse of geometry
forms a precipice
one step over I can breathe of another ledge
falling until legs meet another age of growth
Light protruding from the sentiments that birthed
a new aura of spoken geometrical aptitude
of angular hope
Fallen, I traverse the fields of diamond shards
and shelter pain from the grounded soil
fertile
of the memories only the light reflecting off the
dual sided branches
can penetrate the remaining
pieces of a melted patchwork heart
