September - Poem 16
September - Poem 16 / Laura Bandy
When the young woman sitting at the table next
in this small plates upscale bistro, Curate,
takes photos all throughout her dessert and ‘grams
them, making kiss-lips peace-sign influencer-
worthy selfies as she holds tidy forks-bites to
her face, then begins to slide down, slowly,
the way I imagine a 70’s waterbed might undulate
as you place a cautious limb on the mattress,
trembling, perhaps, after too many Bees Knees
cocktails out with friends: her flower of a mouth
already turning blue, cheeks waxen and eyes
aflutter in her skull’s slot machine, when… Forgive
me. Forgive the way my body freezes while
my brain continues on, like an alcoholic blackout in
reverse, spits out similes as though that might
help the girl on the floor right now, seizing, and my
hand considers extending, maybe to do some
thing other than hold a pen, I hear a woman’s voice
[clear as the water in my glass I asked be refilled
over and over, and could you add a lemon slice this
time, please, could you keep bringing me that
which makes this body go, flow forward, in contrast
to a body stopped] shout the phrase I’ve only
heard before in films and; what do you know? A
nurse in heels and sequins comes from back
of the shot, a long take, they call this, blonde
blowout floating up like (I’ll say it) angel
wings as she kneels, places purse between teeth and
tongue to save from the slicing bite, cradles
a stranger as if her own newborn, and then, then
I can move. And she, she, she. All three—
background, middle-ground, deep focus—all three
women (whose story is the eternal one)
begin again.
Howling / Alicia Boemi
C h a n g e
m e.
C h a n g e
m e.
You, in your enormity, can do that,
right?
I howl.
Awoooooo
My neck splinters to look at you.
We’re in purgatory down here.
The ripe and rotting moon sees all.
Because Jonathan Franzen said a Book is Allowed One Cliché / Jesse DeLong
I open the drawer in my office for snacks
but find only a millipede
scuttling over an empty M&Ms bag,
and earlier I read the passage
in Dracula where Renfield feeds
a fly to a spider to a bird
and hopes for a cat so that each
accumulation of life will add together. Maybe
there is a lesson there—not about the grotesque
fooderies, no, but about adding to and layering
experiences. How the millipede
is a gift on this lonely morning early
where no students will visit
and my wife and child are elsewhere.
Last night a perfect
rainbow (please, allow me this
cliché because it’s true) arched
out of a puff-ball of a cloud. I had never
seen that, not out of a cloud
like that, and I was glad I didn’t
have my phone on me to take
a picture.
Ghazal for the Lost / Shelly Krehbiel
Let’s get in the truck. You’ve got country
on your mind and on the radio: country.
Music still plays behind the bars of memory
though many things are lost in the country.
County roads are a way of counting. One tree,
miles until the next in straight-line country.
It’s not a question of losing myself. I’m hungry
whenever wind blows. I want to see country.
Don’t forget how it felt to stand, though angry
others have the power to bend good country.
Tip your hat, if you still have one, to the lost, see
their faces, the ones no longer left in this country.
Hawks and vultures ride the updrafts, so free,
while rabbits run for cover in open country.
Though I feel old dust in my throat, I must sing
for wide skies and wings, as I lose my country.
Love, love the Lax’yip, / rob mclennan
To rend the earth. What are we doing. A line, on Prince Rupert. What is your truth? Bliss fulfillment. The hub, of the north coast. Skeena, Grand Trunk, Ts’msyen. Of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland. My second language, is steps. Out, stretch the length. Pipeline, pipeline, shale. We will never admit we are buried. Such savagery. Historical, sequence. You can’t come into language, as into a mountain. Eras, end. What is fragile, we mangle, we purposefully break. Diagonals, research. Facts matter, notions. What the lungs suffer. Word, approaches the word. A subversive poetics. Predictable, loss. A sound toward leanness. Antiphonal, trees. To outlive, the company. Hudson’s Bay. What if we stopped. Just, stop.
Bob The Reader / Piper Rasmussen
Bob didn't help to build the bigger house
even when his siblings heaved the spongy
wartime lumber. He was Bob the Reader --
the family's Encyclopedia.
When he tried to go outside to help,
he got himself bit by a frothing dog.
The mastiff ran away until his brothers
gunned it down, & until his sister dragged
the lumpen body home for rabies tests.
It was heavy, and Bob had to take
the Greyhound bus that left just after class
to a city with vaccines in stock.
When Uncle Bob enlisted, he was smart:
studied radios, and met the mark
to be assigned Technician on the spot:
a bookish man who'd had enough of shots.
a climate crisis tanka #2 / Connor Simons
you bite at my neck
and the bruise waits ‘til morning
to ripen itself.
somewhere a wildfire smolders,
waiting for april’s first thaw.
Is it bad that I (still) want it / Veronica Vo
The lesbian pulp ending even if there’s all that
screaming and crying and heartbreak
in the middle. And at the end.
Doesn’t it all feel worth it, those moments
of bliss. Like trying to find beauty in the mundane
but instead of the mundane it’s the electrifying
feeling of simple connection. So easy.
The fallout is terrible. Trust me, I know,
been threatened with beheaded stuffed animals,
stalked, written about slanderously, ghosted in person,
on the clock, straight up left on heard in real life,
made the rounds of the tumblr shit-talking circuit,
seen the ex’s new girl that looks just like me, still,
it’s worth it, the moment when you feel understood
for a moment – seen, through the flecks of light
filtering through the green or brown of someone else’s eyes.
Sunlight coming through the trees.
Treehouse / Melinda Wilson
Call it a hole. Call it a home.
Call it a wound or a birthing canal.
Whatever we’ve called it,
we can’t seem to fill it.
Philosophers muse over the void,
but if we could build skyscrapers
like termites – mountainous ruins
of saliva and feces – all the holes
in the walls would not jar us.
We are not the only architects,
erecting fixed homes of maximum
stress. The little long-tailed tit
integrates its nest with the landscape,
hopeless to go undetected.
Nature offers perspective
on primates who won’t build:
we are evolutionarily driven by fear,
which drives all animal action,
like the way I don’t want to live
with you, but I value not being alone.
Like coral polyps bound to our reefs,
I can’t ever touch you. When worn down
and dead, we’ll settle as sand on the sea-
bottom, and then, we can be together
with no fear of the future. For now,
we must safeguard our weakest flesh.
Shells are one of the most common
and primitive forms of protection.
Sometimes I fall in love with shells.
None of us is as brave as the naked
hermit crab stealing a mollusk shell
that just might be perfect.
It considers the decision carefully:
should I change or not change?
At most, we can remove obstacles
to lie like lungfish in a pile of muck,
taking awful gasps when the ponds
have dried. We have been building
this home all our lives. The sad part
is that we never get more skillful,
so our last work will be almost
identical to our first.
