September - Poem 28
Alien love poem #1 / Yael Aldana
At a party in Dumbo under the Brooklyn bridge/ You with your long Maiblu barbie hair/ Your round I-smoke-pot-glasses/ It might not have been called Dumbo then/ maybe people just started calling it Dumbo/ You in your original 70s vintage shirt from Domseys/ the hippie slash rock and roll fantasy I didn’t know existed/ didn’t know I wanted./ talk to you for a few minutes/ hear your funny little chuckle.
I ask guys out/ I am known for being sexually aggressive/ but I’m not in the mood
nursing a breakup where I asked him out first/ not in the mood/
leave you standing there.
The party goes all night/ you, me, and your roommate the only ones left/ at dawn/ I’m on couch/ right foot tucked under myself./ waiting the morning light to go home on the subway
Your roommate asks me if I want to go/ go with you guys/ to breakfast or whatever/ I really didn’t talk to her/ barely noticed her/only noticed her because of you.
I didn’t figure out till years later/ you asked her to do it.
Raising Children When the World is on Fire / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
The world is on fire
but this house is not.
Some days I am the bucket
some days I am the water
being flung on the roof
to keep it all from burning down.
XXVIII / Kendra Brooks
Poetry is like
a lighthouse:
nondescript in daylight
hours, a tourist
attraction by the sea,
too many stairs,
narrow windows,
and in summer no ac.
But bring the darkness,
what’s more a storm,
and that’s when
a lighthouse likes
to shine
and will perform
like a brilliant beacon,
a poem.
Joplin Documentary / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Imagine the ceaseless crash of a freight
train wind. Imagine the vortex
whirring you out of the car window.
You’d tried to pleasure-drive the storm
of a generation. What was the vision?
It bore you like a clod, like a shard, the trees
twisting scraps into shrapnel, unzipping
your ribs. Imagine the miracle
that landed you engineless in a field,
sea of muck amid all the parts
of everything that was. You emerged,
heart beating into the part of the story
no one knows to ask for—
vampire mushroom spores that rooted
through sewn-up wounds, the ground
vengefully undoing all it could.
Unlike some, you didn’t leave town.
You’ve got kids now. Life goes on,
multiplies, branches. It can’t be easy,
that story on the body, the memory.
For Worse or For Better, For Whatever It’s Worth / Yvette Perry
At almost 25 years the marriage had outlasted
the times of its birth. Where once there was a
bubble, filled with so many like minded others, now it was
just them. Had they held on for 15 or so years more,
the pendulum of lifestyle alternatives may have
swung back to meet them. But Reagan, two private schools,
a few moves, and one failed business had a gravitational pull
impossible to overcome. In the wake of the marriage,
four lives, each sectioned off, each alone. She’d remain that way
long after the others had found their way to new lives.
When it was her turn to build a family, she bowed to tradition,
vowed to impart mistakes only of her own making.
Here was a new bubble, with only the four of them.
Others wanted in, even if just to observe and learn—but they were
neither welcomed nor needed. She protected the boundaries
of the bubble with her entire being.
When her own 25-year mark came and went, she believed herself
to have done something of significant importance, she believed
she had vanquished a curse. For whatever it may be worth, she was
not exactly right. But also: she wasn’t exactly wrong.
Greater Bounds / Amber Wei
Fractured along indivisible boundary
and sight occluded by
not knowing when
the world suddenly opened
to the dreamer
wrought with the cave
and the cavern of stalactites
caving smaller
Time argues with
the moon
which withstands the ability
of walls to move
and arms outstretched
the earth feels its own limits
like it saw its own reflection
shocked by the avenue of growth
and budded it splinters
in two
