September - Poem 12

People, Place, and Problem / Laura Bandy

The writer, Liz Moore, uses this template
in fiction instead of an outline. So doing,

she does not know what’s coming. When
the story hits a wall, makes a sticky mess,

she goes back to “the trunk of the tree,”
last time the story made sense. As an epic

messy-maker myself, I set it up. People:
the ones walking by outside my window

right now. Place: too dismal to name. Oh,
okay. I’m in a spaceship that seems to be

taking on extra weight, maybe smuggled
cargo from a new first mate, hold—I am

lying again. It’s raining in the Midwest and
Problem: too much water makes the soil

irate, soaks the crops including corn and
more corn, also soybeans and corn again

which offers stalks that shoot so high (knee-
high by July, men on tractors always say) but 

only when  the ground is dry enough to keep 
those roots from drowning, see, so that the less 

successful varietals go to feed the hogs, snuffling 
in pens like the men in our prison just down 

the way, and those high-quality ears can be used,
fused with other nutrients (don’t ask what

else, you won’t want to know) to feed us, and
humans kernels and karo syrup, dextrose and

bourbon, Xanthan gum and Chicha beer, hominy
and popcorn, even Vitamin C and cobs so sweet

you’ll swear you’re floating somewhere in cotton
candy outer space where plants are hard to grow

those in the know say, but maybe one day, one day
out among those stars igniting as “gravity compresses

together the hydrogen in their cores to the point that
the atoms splice, mutate” and, ah hell. It’s fine. We’ll
go to Mars.

—quoted lines from Reddit/Science query: Why are all the stars on fire? Why aren't

there just trillions of balls of gas that didn't ignite into nuclear furnaces?

That Dingy Old House   / Alicia Boemi

They are tearing down the old house across the street. 
I did not live there but, 
saw the bare inside of it and, 
couldn't help but see the ghosts of
memories forgotten and remembered. 
Time taken away, 
brick by brick, 
as the roof falls. 
A new house will be built —
new people will come and go. 
People turn to memories, 
turn to ghosts. 
And so life continues. 

Marginal Notes on Postcards from a Field of Slightly Askewed Dandelions by Chu Mu-yen /  Jesse DeLong

Each postcard slightly alters the original image, a woman with very short hair, looking startled as a bright light shines on her face, and in each successive image she turns slightly to the left, her face becoming more and more out of focus until we can only see the back of her head, which has been shaved.

“This isn’t a field you’d lay a quilt down in if you wanted your loved one to still love you.”

I tried, once, to pick them for tea. They dried, strung up, over my sink for weeks until I forgot about them and eventually threw them away.

Some patches, green, where the grass has flourished, and others, brown, where the hooves have trampled.

Sort of like that art exhibit in Greensville where you step through the series of partitions and view various projections of yourself, some looming like a too-large-shadow, some hued in an increasingly brighter red.

Though apparently you can eat them raw in salads and partake in your daily need for Vitamin K.

“The bumper, barnacled over in rust, looking like a ship-wrecked submarine.”

Art is the best-suited medium for appropriation, maybe because those who make it are constantly trying to fit themselves into a functioning form.

“like how you used to place gum at the entrance of a gopher hole.”

The artist, for instance, as frying pan.

“The electric fence doesn’t make a hum, the hum is inside you, and so you touch the taut wire just to see if you can feel the sound.”

If you tear out this final page, patiently at its slotted edge, careful not to rip the actual stamp affixed, and you wrote something about yourself, who, really, would you even send it to?

Didn’t you, though, hide in one once as your neighbor scanned the unusually starless night with his flashlight, looking for you, or someone like you?

Dark Oxygen (A Ribcage) /  Shelly Krehbiel

the same as what we breathe up here though no one knows
[how]
it is made. a secret, like so many others
[deep]
beneath the great waters. where mystery is all that
[can]
be proven. the assumption has always been that
[life]
created these molecules that make other lives
[be]
an anomaly come to life to life to life
[as]
breathing became creatures, became us.
[we]
think we should be able to explain everything,
[lose]
the beyond-us as we throw stones into waves,
[our]
way of casting something away, sending our small
[selves]
out into what we cannot see. they drift and sink
[in]
blue until blue disappears. and somehow down there
[each]
molecule matters. deepest darkness makes its own
[breath].

Knights in white satin, /  rob mclennan

To a glow, in hand. Robert Creeley’s example. They swirl. This altitude of thumbs. Fittingly. A theatre of mayhem, absurd. Mayhem, words, Catullus. Mind you, he? Mark every beat, set everything aloud. Aflame. Compare wheels, clouds, automobiles. Joys like this, this. No stone, unturned. Is this possible? Light. The reflecting pool, offers. Orange alert. I hear the orcas are vocal. Today’s horizontal. Vertical. The day swimming whole. Disarray, altitude. Fan theories, never. A conscious decision to voice. Of course, Michigan.

Service at Exotic Fragrance  / Piper Rasmussen

I also go to Catholic church occasionally…
the child in me desperately needs the bells and smells.
-Patty Duke

Closest thing to an apothecary
you'll see today. Catch the incense
from the subway, a drift of virga

all the way from 104th & Lex.
Walls lined with bottles,
never empty. Take-a-number

from the DMV-style paper roll as
bottles shimmer -- just glass,
but not just glass -- gifts & tonics

of the senses! You can inhale
everything inside. It's for you,
just for you, custom-made-to

order, always signature.
Go early and alone
or all the people will already be 

transformed: Ruby Orchid 
with L'Eau Rouge #1, and Essential
Neem. Ben's Diluent. Musk Oud &

Oud Santal;
Yves St. Laurent
and Palo Santo. Bodies

of all the saints in bottles.
Take a number;
wait to hear the bell.

ode to a dead black-capped chickadee in my front yard  / Connor Simons

it’s not that you’re beautiful   you’ve become the texture of cardboard left out in the rain
or the ragged contours of a gut whittled from years of cheap red wine   and what’s
calling you beautiful?   the same as when a mother walking her child sees you before
the child does and puts her hand on his shoulder   distracting him with the goldenrod
a neighbor has let sprout in their front yard   that black cap that used to furrow
as you pecked at stubborn seed walls is turning into something else entirely
a tooth   rain clouds hoarding their storm   the expanse of gaze looking back at the length
of disappointment   or not even that   not really   what you are now is a dead thing
losing its color   grass embracing your body in a way that sky most likely never did

Pink Room Bouncer / Veronica Vo

After Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

The bouncer operates
on an outdated model of chivalry.
He says for every guy that pressures
you there’s another that will punch him.
Says, you’re girls in a big city, you should
know this.

Laura Palmer’s father says, I always thought
you knew it was me. Baby angel
face of porcelain. Who chooses who gets saved
and who doesn’t. By the time
this music crescendos and the lights stop flashing
you will understand what I mean.

Can’t hear anything over this music. Might as well
be speaking backwards. That time I was
pressured by a strange man, pure joy sullied
on the street barely 16, where were these
masculine defenders? Where were this bouncer’s
men. I could have thrown a stone and reached one.

The girl you knew dies. I want all my
garmonbozia (pain and sorrow). It looks like corn.
How can I make you understand. These rooms
are mirrors of each other. It’s so fucked up.
Dale Cooper asks which is harder to believe,
supernatural possession or the depths of men’s evil.

Not one did anything to help.
The man said, try to run. I was so scared
I didn’t even scream. In my best concert attire.
I learned why women are scared to exist at night.
Where were the good ones then. The gallant guardians.

That magically appear. To fend off the others. The bouncer pisses me off. We feed his ego to get in. Corn. He imagines himself a hero. A good one. It doesn’t matter. How many of them there are. I learned. It doesn’t matter. 

Worry Siren    /  Melinda Wilson

I am a woman who takes pills,  
often. Yes, daily, but that doesn’t 
mean I don’t face the demons. 
Really, the pills help me to hunt them.  
I seek them for their slaughter,  
which I see as a kind of saving.  
I kneel tall on my bed and call  
to the creatures my narcotic  
songs of sedition: Worry your bones 
if you will, but to dwell  
is to disappear,  
to sit surrounded  
by cliffs and rocks 
and to see only danger,  
no drop dead, bonny apparitions. 
And indeed, the male sirens 
all died off, disappeared from our history 
scrubbed off our stone slabs 
and torn out of our books,  
fed to the flames, then the ashes shoveled 
into the fields to better feed future soil.  
And that’s just the problem.  
The problem is the future 
and its potential for problems.  
So, I am a woman that takes pills,  
often. Yes, daily, and that doesn’t  
mean I don’t still break down,  
don’t still lose my shit and scream 
down the hall for the neighbors 
to keep it the fuck down, don’t  
cry at the smell of urine marking 
my walls or the very fact of the walls 
boxing me in, keep me close to the loss  
and the possibility that I will keep losing.  
But fuck that worry siren. 
I’ll check in with her tomorrow 
if tomorrow comes at all.