September - Poem 25
Rejected Zip Ode / Yael Aldana
3) it’s if the
3) white hot heat
0)
6) never ends. Recycles and then returns
2) morning anew.
So you wanna be a poet / Catherine Bai
the first step
is to make it beautiful
not the poem, I mean
but your life
how do you make your life beautiful?
1. put a treat on top of the garbage bins at Christmas, so the raccoons that come nightly can have a feast
2. catalogue every shade of green that brings delight
3. give away your last bit of cash
4. make a campfire at night and kiss someone with your eyes closed
5. learn your mother’s language
6. learn an instrument and play it badly to an audience of loved ones; make a grand bow to their raucous applause at the end
7. take someone to the movies and take their hand when the main characters start to fall in love
8. eat a peach in the summertime
9. swim in the ocean, then let the sun dry off every last bead of saltwater
10. talk to children
11. make ten paintings and destroy nine of them… then destroy the tenth
12. treat the world as your life partner, meaning: don’t abandon her
Writing Poems While Boats Explode / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
It is September and
I am writing poems while boats explode
in the eyeless sea. Fear is a fault line
beneath the hot street. Somewhere
on the internet, a god with salt on his tongue
is drawing lots, deciding who will sink
and who will burn. The sea opens and closes
its vast white eye, blinking bodies
out like splinters.
XXV / Kendra Brooks
In the way you anticipate eating chocolate
you cannot have no memory of sweetness
or ignore anticipation and forget
past satisfaction.
But if you could try!!
Try to let each new taste be new;
Bite into uncharted territory
Maybe close your eyes to wipe clean
the memory of your first sunrise, first kiss
And not return to the familiar
expectations of golden explosions.
Instead invite an introduction to darkness
imagine yourself in the depths of a cave
Let your lungs expand in utter darkness
like a flock of morning birds
flapping their wet wings, rising in sound
startled by the first gust of morning air.
If you could let your heart feel the weight
of the possibility of something unknown,
and unmistakably beyond desire.
If you you could pretend that you never knew
pleasure or even the glory of confections,
the taste of sweetness, the satisfaction of delight
so that when it comes it could be a new
discovery all over again, would you?
Bank / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
What does it hold,
the sky’s old gray
belly, other than its store
of stems and violence? Some
thing rides toward us—mount,
mountain, mounting. Grumble
of Huns, their cavalry speed hard
to perceive. The backwards of when
in an airplane, caught in the warp of up.
Gravity, they say mucks with time—the farther
from core, the faster matters pass the temporal plane.
That’s why the satellites tick thinner minutes.
How quick I know you grow
the increased distance.
This Poem Is a Zine / Yvette Perry
There’s no “I” in poem
The Masters decided long ago
what rules there’d be like where to
break the lines,
what words should rhyme.
They detached feet designed for dancing
and made them into
mathematical formulae, attached prefixes
like penta- and hexa- making
mockery of beating hearts
There is no room for me here
There is an “I” in zine
I make and
break rules as I please
I transform blank paper to possibilities
I type, I write, I paint, I draw, I glue
I cut a slit
partly down the paper’s center,
fold several times this way and that,
make a little booklet that I give to you
This zine is so full of I
and like I, imperfect—
yet still can dance
Refracted / Amber Wei
So tell me when you have mercy
and the night is an oblong hue
and the shade no longer covers
what warm unspoken sadness
exists where shapes have no figure
only to be called unidirectional
so what is misfigured
is rather scattered
and I yearn for you to hold the
prism of light
to allow all sadness to enter
to allow the nighttime to exit as blue
