September - Poem 27
Grifter / Yael Aldana
I admired her, although it was me
in her sights
She saw what she wanted
she was coming
by any means necessary
she will bend and push
and pull and yield
and tweak to get her way.
You are just like her
the woman who gave birth to me
but is not my mother
she is just like you
not my mother
could not be my mother
not capable of being a mother
hates me
because she hates herself
hates me because
my adopted mother loved me
hates me because I love my adopted mother
who became my mother
a real mother
hates me because my adopted
mother became my mother
no longer adopted, just a mother
hates me because I didn’t crave her abuse
like sweet breath
hates me because I turned my back on her
bullshit without giving a shit
hates because my real mother died
and she is just some woman that never
gets tired of hurting me.
you just like her
her just like you
her
you
Just like
Just alike.
Winding Stream Party / Catherine Bai
Just because it’s ancient doesn’t mean it’s not
difficult. Ask anyone who’s given birth
or been pregnant
or fucked
or just born, really.
That’s why everyone gets a drink at the end
whether they wrote a verse or not.
The cup of rice wine wiggles in and out of sight
but don’t worry. It’s coming.
Communion / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
I birthed him slick and wild as an otter,
riverine, black eyed and bound to no saviour
but undercurrents of thirst.
Our bright world of noise frightened him.
The first years he spent bound to my chest
with a length of knotted cloth, small fingers
tangled in the estuaries of my hair.
I whispered prayers without shapes
into the swirled shell of his ear.
I fed him all the milk this body
could bear.
Now you ask what he might become.
Outside, his laughter rises, like mist,
into the agile certainty of air.
We talk about our children as though
our hands hold back the river’s flow.
The truth is, no mother knows what will grow.
In my dreams, I went alone into the darkness
to find him, in the rift where everything
and nothing lives
We build a life on a bridge made from breath.
All is tide. All is waiting.
Time flicks its tail in the depths
between us, vast and silent.
Our children come to us
along submerged pathways of spirit.
Love is a sacred crossroad,
a place where many rivers flow
In the great river’s fractured light,
we are all different beasts come here to drink.
We were all led here by the same thirst.
XXVII / Kendra Brooks
Not another word. Promise.
Cuz when you hear onions
I’ve said tulips
And when you say
“You’re welcome!”
I’ve not felt grateful in the least.
Onions make you cry
and your beauty does the same to me.
“We’ll make it work,”
means it’s not working.
When you offer those words as encouragement,
it feels like enforcement.
Then when you say orange
I crave juice, cold and sweet, dripping from fruit
but you mean the color of a Robin’s beak
as it claims a juicy worm.
I promise. Not another word.
Monkey Business / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Ezra Klein said one day combustion engines will die
when people stop believing in them. In fact, we’ll
wonder how we ever lit those fires, why we blew up
the world with coal dust. Near dusk my husband
and I take the roadster for a topless ride. You can,
inhaling gas and the bake of asphalt, sense that
decadence. The leaching glow of the ombré sky
jewels the traffic lights. We slow to a ruby, race
the topaz. The thrill is in how fast we get to the limit,
the whirlwind in the engine fan, the boiling rumble
that takes up all the space for conversation.
At destination I order my usual—a souped up cone
of monkey business. I feel so American, licking
my banana-brownie ice cream in a parking lot
in the sticky heat of a second wave of summer.
It’s My Turn to Speak in the Circle / Yvette Perry
And I share about how
last night someone smashed
my back window, broke
into my car and stole my stereo,
Run-DMC’s Raising Hell
still in the cassette deck
Someone in the group asks,
How’d that make you feel
and I struggle to say
just how very, very angry
Why would someone
take from me, who had
so little to begin with?
Didn’t they see the broken
toothpicks in place of buttons?
All 20 around the circle nod,
several say they’re sad
this happened to me
We wrap up sharing and
I go to set out snacks
I turn round to see him
He presses something into my palm
It’s for you so no one
ever steals from you again
He runs off and I open my hand, see the
bright orange plastic snake, fresh
from a bubble gum machine capsule
I stand for several moments,
bowl of carrot sticks in one hand,
the snake in the other,
try my hardest not to cry
as I call 20 4-year-olds to
wash their hands for snack time
Gold Moon / Amber Wei
Were you left as a barley in the forest
not knowing which wilderness has captured the
ardor of imagination
that leaves forests lost
as a howling wolf
who has lost the sky
Sit senseless
on doubtful rock
of cemented nature
who knows no reprieve to weight
as carried by words
to the path that led us to become barley
as the seeds to life
giving birth to the woods
where wandering breaths of the forest
led us to become captivated in the leaves
that we mistaken
as home
