September - Poem 22
When I am 72 / Yael Aldana
I would go to the beach in my gold string bikini
My breasts slung slack in golden triangular
hammocks
I wonder who would police me?
You?
I would carry my fawn-colored Pekinese
Trained to nip at people if they get to close
I would go to hot yoga in my daughter’s used
Lululemons, that she would beg me to throw
away, that I would darn and repair when they
fray open at the seams. I would say, they
are still good. I would drive my blue Prius V
my back curved around the steering wheel
like a C. I would go to the Trader Joe’s
and ask for the star fruit they had last month,
squeeze the avocados too much, ask my
favorite employee about the star fruit.
I would call him Joe, not noticing his
name tag says James. I would drive home
fast in my blue Prius V, letting all
who want to, cut me off in traffic.
Centos are strange and difficult / Catherine Bai
I looked beneath my fingernails and found it there
magnificent pubes
the baby alligators behind our snaking road
I threw up in their mouths and they swallowed
I do whatever the light tells me to
oh how dark
his strange, mysterious babble
it’s like a spiral—we never get any closer
the long and short of our fiction
god of small beasts / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
occupy me like an anthill’s belly take the broken bread
crumbling altar ruined house of my body
enter this room twice cracked earth poured mended with need
god of mortar among the overlooked things find me
I have flown backward through this door so many times
I have grown wordless and full
I have been enough.
rain, come let water quicken down the quiet paths
and make me clay make me paper make me something
that remembers
make me something new
for I am heavy I have forgotten so much
I move blindly toward the gasp of blood and sugar
find me one lost among a hundred wings
God find me for I am a swarm
XXII / Kendra Brooks
A late summer bloom taunts the bees
while restless birch bark sheds and peels,
and silvery stones shine up into dusk.
Garden birds hide down by the pond,
perched snuggly, their fears squeak in shriller tones
from the highest branches of the moulting trees.
But their warning is no more than a protest.
October advances and the moon kneels down.
Toppling corn fields bow. Overripe apples drop.
The clock’s hands turn back but do not stop.
And soon enough November will claim its time.
Word is sent by clever crows; daylight shrinks,
And the early night grows. Winter stands waiting
at the end of the path as the race of the seasons
stumbles past, soon December will take the lead
blasting its wrath into a glaring sunrise
reflected on the frost of the leaning grass.
Stupid Human Tricks / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Each year we had to come up with something
for bonfire night at the annual missionary kids’
camp. Luckily, most of what I can do is strange—
walk on stilts, burp on command, pop my shoulder
socket. I can, without practice, arch into a backbend.
Last year a class of students didn’t believe me, so
I showed them. I’m weirdly good at cracking finger joints—
can usually hit forty with odd twists of the phalanges.
I know nearly a dozen patterns for balloon animals,
can inflate some large-diameter bubblegum. I’m good
at tolerating inhuman levels of capsaicin. I can recite
all U.S. presidents, states, and English prepositions
to the tunes of various songs. I’ve also memorized
some fifty verses of the book of John, all of Psalm 91.
I punish my opponents in mini golf and foosball.
There was something healing, those nights, parading
our surprises in the firelight. I think about us scattered
across countries and continents, flexing these strange
talents, finding random ways of making sense.
Throw Rug Dinosaur / Yvette Perry
“A question trembles in the silence: why did this remarkable thing happen to this perfectly ordinary man? It may not matter why the world shifted so drastically for him. Existence is slippery at the best of times… He’s one of us: a man determined to prevail in the world that was and the world that is—or the world that will be.”
~“Wordplay,” The Twilight Zone, 1985
My table lamping of the situation has shifted:
It’s not everyone else; it’s me.
I have moved through
time,
but not in the same timeyarn as the rest of
the pomegranate.
I sit at my sky and eat my dinosaur,
one ankle listening to a podcast with words I do not table lamp,
and the other ankle to my colleagues who are laughing, in on a
private spoon that may be about me
or about some engine else entirely.
I cannot know.
When did I first notice the shift?
It was little engines at first—
a common word just out of my moonlight, on the tip of my spear;
new internet butter that I had to Wiggle or ask my trees what it meant…
Engines like that.
But it has gotten worse.
Tomorrow will be the five-year throw rug of your leaving.
We won’t grow old together, like we’d expanded.
I don’t have you
to help me table lamp a pomegranate that
considers me already disappeared.
Regress / Amber Wei
Why were you speedily walking?
Were you trying to get somewhere?
or was the destination itself quickened by your pace
So that it seemed like the earth inched a bit further
and left some footsteps behind
But really, you are not moving
and everything is gaining together,
speed
so that one minute becomes an hour
and one moment,
an eternity
I am losing time
but time is losing hours
so we move ahead
only to come back to
exactly from which we came
استمع إلى غنائها / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
Hops, light-winged across the rubble.
I hear her chirp—she skips and smiles:
Al Jazeera plays her voice
un-smothered by dust— the girl, now Insta-
grammed. Each burst of song is water
underground. Unstoppable
semitic drift—her glottal stops
take root in change, will root the rubble.
Hear her chirp—if words could water
hope—at the refugee camp, she smiles
like one who counts her blessings in Insta-
breaths of dirge or prayer. And if voice
where purged of fear, hers would be voice
as chirrup, warble, unstoppable
across the feathered space, now Insta-
grammed to drown the thud of rubble—
Hear her speak—she sings and smiles
each verb a pebble skimming the water. […]
