September - Poem 19

Nocturne / Laura Bandy

On a dusk stroll down
our town’s prettiest street,

I pressed my nose
into plush petals of cream

hydrangeas, and a bee
blew out as though

I’d breached her home.
But a flower is not a home

any more than a holiday
party you attend on Christmas

is. Yes, there are chairs, tables
festive greenery that feels

familiarly domestic, yet
the photos in their frames,

the fussy canapes, even
pets you would like to stroke

and recognize as your own
are alien here—an interstitial

space, temporary transition
between you and your eventual

destination. Soon, the sun will drop
and moon rise in her white dress.

I get lost often, even on common
paths I’ve known all my life long.

When I walk back all my wrongs and
all the steps to my door, I know music

will be playing, usually a new tune
that my guy has found and spun

so that notes float out through nudged up
windows on this nearing autumn evening—

oh, you knew it all along. Home is a song.

True Love  / Alicia Boemi

 I lost my eternity with you.

Teardrops form,
but no noise comes out.

A sad song. 
Ooohh—Ooohh

It’s all a reminder of how deeply and desperately I miss you.
I can still hear your last heartbeat.
A noise I won’t forget.

ooohh—ooohh
Can you come home?

Now,
I know what true love is.

I Was Supposed to Write a Poem Today /  Jesse DeLong

I Was Supposed to Write a Poem Today, but Didn’t, And So Here Is a Blank Page That Represents My Shame, Though the Symbolism Doesn’t Really Work, Because Shame Feels More Astringent, Like a Hangover From Rut-Got Gin, Which Also Makes Me Wonder Why the Blank Page Often Represents Hope, a Feeling Also Unlike the Emptiness of No Words, And More Like the High Point of That Same Cheap Gin—That’s It, Maybe Gin Is the Thing We’ve Really Been Looking For.

[Kirsten, can you please give me enough blank space to represent a blank page?]

Cento for the Pale Princess /  Shelly Krehbiel

  (lines from Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), H.D., W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot)

No apologies ever need to be made
for your chance smile.
How I envy you this.

I’m on my own.
I should have been a pair of ragged claws.
I’m the face in your dreams of glass.

All those angels with their wings glued on --
I have met them at close of day.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

What moonsongs do you sing your babies?

Graceful swans of never topple to the earth
And indeed there will be time
To find they have flown away.

Incomplete passage,  /  rob mclennan

Lord Elgin, what have you. A forest of English, the first stanza of listen. Sapper’s Bridge, Biddy’s Lane, Miss Harmon’s School for Girls. The Royal Sappers and Miners. Points, for a purchase. Such tangible counterpart. I wish for this book. How many heads, sunk. To grammar is born. The first round is simple, revolt. I’ll have a second. Combustion. As a reasonable centrist, what kind of hysteria. My present state, echoes. Of dirt roads and lines. A dispersion, pronouned. This wildlife of settlement. Iambic feet, Somerset, Cooper. Walks down. Above, all these seraphim. Conyer Livingston Clayton. This kind of translation. Scribe, you may slip. I think often, most likely. Sometimes, in sleep. Paralytic. Crows of Gloucester, John Smith’s Lane. Permanent dead links. Close the window display. Man says, give a twirl. Let me see you.

Annie Dillard's Writing Life  / Piper Rasmussen

When she sat in a windowless cabin
in the cold on the beach,
            and wrote

The line of words is a hammer. You hammer
against the walls of your house. You tap the walls,
lightly, everywhere.                 I was knocked & shaken.

A friend says, write from the wound.
Another says, write from                      the scar.

And at a party for writers,
other recs include:
                   write
‍ ‍like the man in the cage
and the children around him, also in the cage;

write like a dog, early, often,
begging for notice;

one holds off to the end like a key, taunting its lock
                    (or, when acknowledging the inevitable
                              or the deadline)              a puddle sinking into its mud

                                            & another warns that the more orgasms he has
the less he writes (he has accepted this quote from another
                                                                                                          into his body)

rumbles from another table           in the distance     suggest
write like a hailstorm, sudden
        ice-marbles    skittering

and seated, I learn it is
like     breathing,     effortful    when     sick    &       tired   
when done        just like     (& by the way I'm going)      home        

each direction                 reflects bright little mirrors 
inside           cataracted eyes    -- postmodern
                              alteration and absorption --
    a process    of processing    

but no party lasts long enough to keep us
from a windowless room   the hammer & I

Catullus writes Clodia a letter on the road to Bithynia  / Connor Simons

when we are tangled together   your leg between my thighs – odi et amo – there are languages i won’t speak   nameless of course – quare id faciam – isolates found only in the space between the nail and a palm   the frog’s eyes when it notices the first simmering bubble – fortasse requiris – and if your tongue ran across my clavicle – nescio – it might want to master the dialects of a country where lakes have evaporated overnight – sed fieri sentio – but find only the native’s glare   the one for when a tourist smudges glass panes with the pudgy oils filling the wrinkles of their fingerprints – et excrucior – 

What comes after / Veronica Vo

After Life asks, if you could bring one memory
with you into the afterlife what would it be.
My impulse is to choose one with a lover.
Instead, I settle on one with family: all five of us
in Vietnam at a restaurant by the beach, or maybe
in the city, I can’t remember exactly. Only that
it was night and it was cool. I’m making a face
I just found out I can make and it’s funny and
they’re all laughing so hard they’re crying
or barely breathing. This kind of moment
that can’t be orchestrated. A gift life gives you.
That only life can give you. Meaning,
that you have to be alive to experience. 

Dream Baby Dream     /  Melinda Wilson

Today the city exists in sepia tones— Wildfire smoke  
spreads and drapes a thick curtain over the island. Wild- 
flowers wilt, and I miss the blue skies over the peaks  
of the Catskills. At Inspiration Point, where we stop  
for a picture, the haze threatens to erase it all, the most  
ancient of our structures, and our purest desires. Can a planet  
commit suicide, rest hold of its future from our greedy hands?  
When Alan Vega sings, keep those dreams burnin’ forever,  
keep that flame burnin’‍         ‍keep those dreams baby, 
those dreams keep you free       I imagine the Earth’s  
canyons as smiles spread wide across its blue green face,  
and I think               dream, baby, dream.