September - Poem 21
Waiting / Yael Aldana
Hands intertwined behind the back, waiting,
Egg white pleated skirt dusting your knees, waiting,
Looking slightly bow-legged in brown flat shoes, waiting,
Scarlet red ring around your sweater at your wrists, waiting,
Sitting in a scarlet couch at the mall, waiting,
Dressed head to toe in pink, waiting,
Standing behind the woman in the lilac hat, waiting,
Standing with a fake red hibiscus in your hair, waiting,
Standing with your pen poised, the waitress, waiting,
Sitting on the gym floor, eleven years old, in green shorts, waiting,
Sitting by the white bed, hospital monitors humming, waiting
for your life to slip past me out the door, waiting.
Your body knows things you never could / Catherine Bai
Not everything needs to be seen
by the love of your life
just because they want to kiss you
doesn’t mean they want to squint into your uterine lining
and look for that one fragile, fading
memory. You know the one—
I didn’t say you couldn’t show them everything
you would never say aloud to your mother
who would’ve loved you anyway, except
you couldn’t be that good, ever.
Yeah, I said it
’cause I’m that way too
the leaking yawn of your mouth
looks so stupid now
but it was celestial, when you couldn’t imagine learning
that one day everyone you know will die
and so will everyone you didn’t know
who died anyway.
Picture the pomegranate tree
in my neighbor’s front yard
they’re not red but green, but I bet you thought of the fruit
ripe and heaving, with scars on the skin
that someone made when the branch was still an embryo
the dark traffic swimming
in the pale, boney pip.
Returning Ashes / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
Touch this blade. This leaf.
This water. Cleanse yourself of
the dust and smoke I leave behind.
I return home in the ash-gray
footprints of mourning children,
of wives past and present who never
speak to each other except to pray.
I return in the dark spaces between
this year and seven decades gone,
each memory a thinning space
between splayed fingers on
a child’s scalp. Anoint yourself
before you enter my house for the last time,
once for the child you carry,
the one I will never meet, and again
so that you might forgive me.
XX: / Kendra Brooks
Tr
ee
ss
tanding still,
tell.
ing
ea
ch other
how
it’s done.
In slant rhyme,
end rhyme,
and inky couplets
scrawled on
The
ir
pap
er so
uls
White Coat Syndrome / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
I’ve always had it—dragged through the dark
halls of hospitals after hours, the behind-the-scenes
treatment of growing up in a doctor’s family. Back
then when it was time for shots, I’d bite Dad’s arm
and run away. The only fun was x-rays, calming
lead bib, the inside-out shadow world of bones
and cartilage. I behave somewhat better now
that my doc isn’t my parent, that it’s someone
who changes every few years, switches clinics.
My brain thinks I’m being enormously brave—
voluntary boosters and well-womans. No pens
in the top pocket, he taps a tablet, gets our visits
over quickly, updates the medical portal, re-ups my
birth control, weighs my risks, my milage in basic
questions and measurements. I find most times
I’ve hardly been touched. So why does the pressure
always go up—so much that now I have to check
at home, upload the results of the pinching cuff.
I don’t know why, but I wish he knew I liked poetry,
that the right questions might get a family history.
Peace (Be Not Still) / Yvette Perry
People, a tempest is raging—
Tempest of would-be despots and
tumult of their clattering kind
They’ve convinced you it’s good to
stay sleeping
Can you see?
The universe is agnostic, not moral, and
if there is an arc it surely will break
before it bends
Justice will be the fairy tale you tell your
grandchildren when you tuck them
under their comforters at night
Are you dozing?
You sing of the stillness of peace,
but peace is not tranquil
A strong peace is forever agitating
A lasting peace is not the default,
and takes harmonized hands and feet
to achieve and to maintain
A true peace can be as wrathful as the
winds and waves that seek to destroy it
Are we ready?
(21 September is the International Day of Peace. The 2025 theme is Act Now for a Peaceful World)
Brighter Lights / Amber Wei
You were stronger when the earth was
circular and brighter than the sun
who called my name
Yet the daylight burns bright
the treasure, that lost is the secret garden
blooms is the soul that keeps
Find that the earth changes
but not its revolution on the axis of tilt
Deepen it inside me
and forget that it was lost
once
for pastures to bloom in the wilderness of
evermore
