September - Poem 17
Fulcrum / Yael Aldana
A forward sway, a retraction
a teetering, over before almost,
at line opposite of before
a fulcrum
I tact the round cheek of a girl
in the oval of my mind, the fine
curve of the cheek to lip, like
fine sand stopped in an hour
glass, to pool in my mind’s
open bowl.
I wept / Catherine Bai
Vervine Tea / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
You were expecting something beautiful,
forgetting how easily small flowers bruise.
It’s true, nothing looks the same once it has been broken.
You strip the stalk beneath cool running water,
thank the roots, rub dirt from mottled leaves.
You bring leaves to a rolling boil until water blooms
until the kitchen is thick with green ghosts.
Much as you ache, no grandmother appears to anoint head
and bind hips. You sit alone in the rising steam, leaking rivers.
The sea has ebbed now, and you are only clay and salt.
Steep yourself in silence. No murmured prayers
stir the air, only the soft hum of your breath.
Fear kneels beside you like a midwife,
tending each hour, each fraying strand of pain.
The baby sleeps against the hot lightning of your chest
fascia and bone flaring, your core a cavern echoing
currents of blood and loss. His breathing echoes in the dark.
Alone, you oil the silvering fault lines of your belly,
murmur prayers to a god who has been torn, same as you.
XVII: / Kendra Brooks
Upon average
One poet dies
Every day.
Somewhere
In the world
Right now a poet
Is facing death.
A poet died
yesterday.
I read his poems
More out of curiosity
Than sympathy, I confess.
Including a self-portrait
In 5 parts, each framed in regret.
It’s likely I never would have read
A single poem of his had he lived
Or was alive today.
Unlike poets, poetry endures
As the trees in winter
Find new life in the spring.
I’d like to imagine,
With a little more luck,
One of his poems
Might have found me
Before he was struck.
Now his death
Has secured that fate.
When was the summer I turned pretty? / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Or did I?
There was no sudden strike of longing returned—
only, it seemed, an endless paging through fantasies,
novels smuggled, dimmed flashlight under the covers.
What would it mean to be wholly in the dream’s triangle,
tangled in a wallpaper’s cerulean stems and ocean
weeds? I think I could feel home in someone else’s
beach house. I could flit between brothers, ruin a few
Christmases, ghost my mom in Paris. I am, I admit,
one of the million millennial women waiting for Belly
to make the right decisions. Funny, the high school
interns I work with like to debate, see scenes differently.
We're just looking from opposite ends at fate. My young
coworker asks if I know the ending. Her eyes dance
with revelation, long dark curls, that little slump in her
shoulders from getting tall over this recent summer.
She’ll never see it coming, her turn, that corner.
Constitutional Crises / Yvette Perry
Article I. Section 2.
“Three minutes,”the anonymous caller said. I imagine the organist playing perfect
Fifths while the Girls help each other with their sashes and bows, smiling in the mirror
Of the basement bathroom. I imagine them singing along with the chords, lyrics
All memorized from hearing the choir sing them Sundays. I imagine the
Other worshipers climbing the steps, entering through the church doors. Other
Persons, then unknown, had already been there, installing hate beneath the steps.
Article I. Section 9.
The reverie of my fantasy shatters like the stained glass. I marinate, instead, on the Great
Migration: masses of people exchanging known dangers for new ones,
Or escaping to North and West at the urging of those who had gone before them.
Importation of rituals, music, dreams provide a sense of warmth despite the cold
Of the weather and/or of the reception they receive. Who can say if they will thrive in
Such climes as these? Hard work might not always be sufficient. Integration, when other
Persons do not think proper to admit them, might always be a gamble.
Article VI.
Shall I continue to think about rotted promises and dreams destroyed? I may
Be, myself, rotted and destroyed,
Bound by proof of history to question the viability of democracy,
By proof of history to distrust the
Oath to the Blessings of Liberty the Constitution demands,
Or I may be required to ratify this history as
Affirmation that Overcome, for We, shall someday never be.
Ancient Time / Amber Wei
Breathing finds it hard
to be still
when air is flight in cruising altitude
transitory
so ripples in oblong heights
shifts the barometer’s measure
of the morrow’s weather
so the breath is sucked in refuge
caged by prediction
and the sundial has no direct feedback from the sun
for shade has occluded sensation
to be able to feel only what is lost
and for the rays to be missed
by the clouds
