September - Poem 17
Sin Tax Triolet / Laura Bandy
My brother asks for a poem about either tax indexing or
the fragility of life. I confess—I know nothing of the first
and have politely ignored the second as a philosopher’s chore.
Why worry? Why contemplate how lickety-split our exit? Or
am I hiding… Time here is short: a wink, really, on God’s face, torn
wing of the angel who fell from father’s favor to father’s curse.
The tax for loving and being loved was always thus: play safe alone or
risk it all, let those brackets creep cloud high. And the last shall be first.
Hollow / Alicia Boemi
And I did love you at one moment in time.
Remember looking over the lake?
Longing,
wishing,
hoping.
You’d lean over,
seal it for us both.
But,
silence.
Love, it washed away in the waves.
What followed: a hollow heart on fire.
For My Birthday All / Jesse DeLong
I want is to watch the Twilight Zone
while you fall asleep next to me
and for our child to sleep, soundlessly,
without disturbance, next to me,
and for the dogs to sleep,
without howling, and for me,
eventually,
to fall asleep,
and for this to be all
I ever really want.
At the Corner of 18th & Friendly / Shelly Krehbiel
As evening comes in, September sun crashing
into the rattling oak tree feels like an accident.
Then there it is, yellow everything.
I said I’d never use the word crash casually again.
Yet there it is, in the same sentence as accident
making golden with the same words
that mean metal and smash and broken
and pain and bruises and not quite sure
what’s memory, what’s shadow, what’s now.
It’s equinox season. Two halves of horizon, two
hands raised into the air to feel warmth before
warmth is lost like shattered leaves.
It’s okay to be nervous, she whispers, takes
my hand in hers. And we go together,
to the place where it happened.
The book of questions, / rob mclennan
Repetition, reset. Inarticulate. The man in the moon. Copy, fold, staple. Copy, fold, staple. A path marked in stone. My teenaged mother saw movies, the theatre next door. This was back in the fifties. A bare lot, might wither. Panopticon, gravel. A fire burns layers. Copy, fold, staple. Copy, fold, staple. Wood planning and turning, mill. Old colonial. Grandfathered, shadow. The walls might collapse. Abiding. Context: a chaise lounge in hell. At the season, flustered. Undefinable realms. Marking chairs, ottomans. Side tables, tasteful. A fire burns, layers. Copy, fold, staple. Copy, fold, staple. This is not where I started. If I am to emerge. Unscathed, if you will. A claim of last words. My freak is unmatched.
Othello / Piper Rasmussen
is onstage in the parks
in Harlem & Columbus Ohio
like the cities' cycles
have synced up (a myth,
by the way, that menses
are more than a shared
anatomical habit). It's been years
since DC did Red Velvet, back
to back with Black Shylock.
James Shapiro's Shakespeare
has been in America a few years
now. A. Van Jordan's When I Waked
I Cried To Dream Again barely
saw the day, each of them
a More Than Ever to ride
like a wave. My kingdom
for a horse that doesn't bolt
so quickly on, herald to a Lear
or Winter's Tale.
The following slot a vicious
Richard, or a Bloat
of Henries. Then following
the dogs of war
a Midsummer reward, just As they Like It.
Back-to-school will flirt with Juliet,
or grown-up Cleopatra with her snake. Only then
might The Audience be Ready
for another Issue Play: a Caesar,
or a Merchant, or Othello Most Profound.
Pick 1 of 3.
The arc of justice bends
around again:
a slowly-bleeding public
sits and spins.
a climate crisis tanka #3 / Connor Simons
mandible-wrecked ash
trees – emerald jaws girdle
and gnaw on sapwood;
if i put my ear to your
chest would i hear snowless months?
day of unbearable lightness / Veronica Vo
after Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen’s score: Towards an Unbearable Lightness (1992)
red Icee stain and beaded bracelets
shapes in the enclosure your hand
reaching through me on the other
side the reaching the reaching
the reaching my hand on your
knee and you smiling so hard
my light in an eternal summer
in conversations with myself
gradually every note changes
in this version a fermata at the end
you don’t let go and I never ask you to
Attempting to Regain Myself after a Long Period of Destruction / Melinda Wilson
The first mistake I made was to desire the past. The following mistakes
were all repetitions of that initial error. When I looked in the mirror, I wanted
to see the girl of my youth or the young woman of the not-so-distant
past who thought she was on the right path. Foolish girl, but pretty and thin,
and happy in her way to float from one day to the next without concern
for her sins. The second mistake I made was to desire the past. Powerless
in the unshakeable grip of nostalgia, I worked to replicate and remake feelings,
which are autonomous interior spirits that will not be told how to fashion
themselves. Products of the present, they laughed in my face, and I begged
forgiveness and took my lashes. But still, I persisted. The tenth mistake
I made was to desire the past. With a bottle of E&J brandy in hand, I emptied
our photo albums one by one. Removed every old ornament from the Christmas
tree and delicately laid them in a felt-lined box because still I would not admit
that they were trash. The one hundredth mistake I made was to desire the past.
Visit the places where I knew the ghosts would be about, read Ashbery & Bishop
in Tompkins Square Park. Believed in a future that would arrive with no scars,
having simply pressed fast forward to a clean part of the tape. The one thousandth
mistake I made was to desire the past. One morning in Marble Hill
I woke to the first mark of progress, a desire to admit the erosion of what once
was. A willingness to endure the discomfort of agnosia that would come with each
small switch. Instead of Dresden or Berlin, I would be like Rotterdam after the war,
bearing less and less resemblance to the buildings that had been there before.
I would not attempt to recapitulate myself but build a new self no matter the time
that would pass in this process or what plague of growing pains. I let go of before.
