September - Poem 24
Absence / Presence / Yael Aldana
The truth is that we are never touching
anything. There are always atoms
vibrating in between
fingers and fur
elbows and couch
shoe and foot.
Nothing is solid, only vibrating
Closer or farther.
My brain doesn’t know this
as I touch the small black
paw of a smaller than usual
cat that used live beneath
my shed.
Where does the sensation
come from of impossible
softness? She doesn’t know
as she lays against me. She
doesn’t know that this warm
feeling of her tiny body against
my arm are atoms shimming
this was rather than that way.
I don’t know this either as I kiss
her small head and she doesn’t
move, stays stock still, fur all
shiny velvet, just the trick
of light at the back of my eyes
reversed.
I make my best attempts in the dark / Catherine Bai
my hands surprise me like a wolf
my mother told me about
a man swivelled his head
and got his throat torn out
when you walk down a road at night
keep your gaze on the ground
someone taps you on the shoulder
check for fur, check for claws
Drawing a Circle on the Eve of a New Year / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
I was born on the eve of a hurricane
with the ocean in my skull,
seawater trapped between brain
and bone. I was born soundless
and unwilling, a wave breaking
over my mother’s body, born
into a house always shuttered
against some unnamed storm.
Now, on the eve of my birthday,
I am drawing a circle.
I wrap myself in a bird’s thin wing,
drink milk fat with unspent rage,
curl into a whorled shell, a question,
crest of a breaking wave.
I have always been moving
from one place to another.
See? Listen to my heartbeat.
I am still running, running
trying to find my way home,
beating down locked doors,
knocking on broken windows.
See my hands? I am folding
the years into paper boats,
tying words together like rafts
with graying thread spun
from the feathers of seabirds,
one letter tied to the next until
every last word has been said.
Balut / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
I soft-boiled
eggs this morning,
sat them in cups, cracked
the tops, and daydreamed
they were balut. Oh the fruit
of a body, that rich soup made
stirring an unborn, amniotic
duck. Everything you touch
so soft—no hard beak, no
peaked feathers, sun of
yolk in its tethers.
I dream of it
forever.
Humble Bragging (after Nikki Giovanni) / Yvette Perry
I was born in the fall of the first dawn.
I taught teens to sit quietly, calmly
as milk and sugar were poured on their heads
and sputum flung at their faces and feet.
I spun Sunday-best three-piece suits and white
cotton dresses from DNA of seals,
then garbed my parents and children in them.
No fire hose water will pierce their skin.
I sat beside Martin in the jail cell,
slipped through the bars, the words he’d written sewn
into the lining of both of my lungs:
…moral means can’t save immoral ends… The
world heard. I can’t fly like birds in the sky,
but I am resourceful, I’ve learned to glide.
Return Trip is Necessary / Amber Wei
I wondered if humanity was ready to see the
open wound who on the heart was
a coal-fired muse
the tear talker anguish within
concealed by the setting sun doubly hidden
by the midnight gleam
Cry on me yet my clothes don’t abide by
earthly rules
they are tainted by grief grown twice
while I let the flowers bleed
Until they dried the atoms who recede
atomic being larger than the trees
that drought
Dry reality causal
unto the point where desperation riddled
by the voices become
utmost bear
In anguish my hands hold
the home of the world
because the pieces are larger than
the soul that tried to complete the puzzle
Erosion beat upon dust
that larger became the mountainous terrain
which deer tried to climb
only to teach the audacious traveler
that twice up the path
was not enough to teach him
how to come down,
returning to the path from which it started
