September - Poem 2
The Fisher King / Laura Bandy
What we have done often can’t be unmade.
This means doilies, or hearts made doily through
careful tatting of the organ into
“a pattern of rings and chains over a
core thread.” Why we might want to shred the hub
of love is a query for another
day. When on or around a quest, one must
pay close attention to the goal. Eyes on
the grail, hand on your scabbard, ready for
whomever might be guarding the prize. I
was fishing when they came for me, a spot
shared by my teacher, who loved it there. He
would often leave desk, pen, paper, poems,
classroom behind and go to the water,
back boat into Lake Limbo, drop a line.
What I thought was mine only ever lived
in my mind, my mind’s eye—stories told low
and hopeless—dragons and knights, mortal wounds.
Even if you wish to keep fishing, just
leave off the interminable watch for
those who would destroy whatever you hold
most dear, even if you yield your post, the
worst will still occur. Kings mean nothing. Myth,
legend, constellated down through ages
so to mend unruly threads, human dreads
such as angling with rod, line, hook, only
to pull up a comb, a boot, a rusted
chalice someone once thought (mad!) to drink from.
A Mass on the Soul / Alicia Boemi
The grass was too green, bright, fresh.
Venomous droplets adorned its blades.
Toxic, killing, cancer-causing burns.
in between your toes.
I was scared. I was brave. I was hopeful.
Too much hope filled my tepid ego.
“You were untouchable,” I thought.
Until that day, the world crumbled around us.
Like hot red ash scorching pale skin.
Blood. Mind. Yi.
Denial waves at me like an old friend
You went in and never came out
I died there, too.
Never came back,
to myself,
to my home,
to my comfort.
Marginal Notes on The Real Identity of Kim Il Sung by John David Lerner / Jesse DeLong
“In a dusty corner of the office, in a drawer seldom opened, in a manilla folder dulled from the years, the docket resides. And make no mistake, the CIA docket is very clear on this—that this man is actually Kim Song Ju, an orphan boy, poor child, who killed his friend to avoid the shame of stealing some food, and who, coerced by the soviets, took on the name of a Korean war hero.”
Other than the final line, Kim does not have a single instance of dialogue in the novel, but continues to affect, like the laws of physics, every movement of the story, such as which direction the prose can muscle or whether a character’s arc will adequately resolve.
Obama had woven into an Oval Office rug this campaign slogan: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Though as he stitched it into the cadence of his speech, the US was barely 200 years old—a mere “ummm…” in the monologue of earth. Martin Luther King Jr., phrasing it more poetically, said, “so in Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had cosmic companionship.”
We think of mountains as a source of power, a stability formed up out of the oceans, so of course this is where Kim built his prison camps.
The isolation and the snow alone would break you.
“Some would say we look up at the same stars, the same half-crescent moon, but all this laborer saw when he looked up was the sweat and dirt running into his eyes.”
Similar to the argument in this passage, Graeber and Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything, lay out the argument that civilization is not a progression, not a building up in levels like a stone fence along the borders of a labor camp, but a movement here, then there, then back here, sort of like the shedding and regeneration of cells in an aging body.
So that we haven’t so much as evolved to be where we are as a society, but that we just happen to occupy this space. This is where we are doing things now, I guess, and these are the things that we’re doing.
Lerner ended up murdering the owner of a bar over the ten dollars he’d put in the jukebox on karaoke night.
The suicide and alcohol rates in regions that winter are higher.
You can see, in all that snow, in all that white and grey, that you yourself have no real color.
“The feeling of gin in his chest is warm and at least the cigarette tip glows briefly red.”
Posthumously, he would be named “The Eternal President” though the most you can hope for is a few generations of your offspring forgetting how you ruined the family cruise ship.
The military demarcation line, where this defector was shot five times, still marks the separation of uncles from nephews.
In 1976, North Korean soldiers, during a tree-trimming exercise, killed with their own axes a pair of U.S. Army Officers who refused to stop pruning a poplar tree.
Choi’s DMZ Colony does a better job of holding history accountable.
“Snow, like the shed dander of a dog, continuously fell as the prisoners, mostly bone now, worked. When the cold froze his eyelid shut, the prisoner waited for the warmth of his eyeball to melt the crystals. Later, Kim Ill Sung’s birthday would be known as ‘Day of the Sun.’”
“Kim turns, head bowed, and his hands, clasped at his side, unfurl so that his fingers spread, and as he lifts his chin to look up at me, he says, “And what about any of this do you think will really matter?”
Sonnet for the Makers / Shelly Krehbiel
How I wanted you to be kind. How could
you not be – you who made the sonnet song,
the telescope – you who waited so long
watching for comets to come, who made wood
and strings into music? Didn’t you pray
to your maker? Didn’t you too crave warmth?
Every map you left behind points to north,
so maybe cold wind was the thing you craved
until all was frozen at last. Is that
why you made me? Were you alone there? When
everything melted, you were sorry. Then
you blamed me, said I was the urgent threat
to your existence. You wanted to kill
me like tigers, like lambs. Yet I live still.
Half-hearted pronouns, / rob mclennan
Who is speaking, please. The kitchen knife. Withness. The sparrow, says density. A wooden spoon, stops. Teeth closed and damp. From one language, another. So many fine tales. What one sees in the mountains. Clearly articulate. When I consider. Molecules, grammar, weak limbs. Pattern. The western barbarians, a late country road. How one’s night is spent. On difficulty, the difficult. Peach trees, require pruning. The hot mic moment. Square kilometres of wildfire. Out of their homes, many properties. I am having difficulty. Scatter, the clouds. Left open, defeat. Performs, what provisionally. Again, and again. Whatever the reason. Dawn, nearly broken. You are sleeping. You do not want to believe.
coffee caddy / Piper Rasmussen
twenty-two and newly-weaned off mochas
the girlboss era peeking up my skirts, I
learned of affogatos, gained some weight,
corrected, clock-work boiling eggs each morning
with Bustelo from a cheap machine, half-
descaled & picked up at the thrift --
sat at a desk which I was told might raise
or lower me. ran back and forth to the Nespresso,
aspired to sip & to sip faster --
lonely, grabbing lattes with old friends
of friends & flirting & then fleeing
by the ends -- each day a thump-tha-thump
of nearly-- syncope--
those were years the coffee carried me.
someone was kidnapped here / Connor Simons
someone was kidnapped here across the street from your daily bus station months out and you’re surprised that the choice of pink for the sticker’s background is what surprises you what surprised you then was just how many SUVs are on the road at a given time keeping yourself warm by using your fingers to count each one passing by and nurturing the hate in your heart as landscape becomes a threat keep an eye on the pedestrian bridge someone needs to post up at the rec center parking lot does anyone recognize that van in negative twenty degrees there’re only so many ways to kindle a flame the breath behind words can try promising that with spring we’ll all pitch in for a community garden or backpack drive or gatherings where we learn how to be better neighbors or even promises told to oneself to be better be less reclusive be quicker to respond to a text be a little more patient as the old woman who walks by your house each day needs to be reminded of your name while you’re trying to remove a burdock without snapping the taproot and letting it come back next year but then there’s hate and maybe its heat is the surprise now, too you hate the way commercials for a chevy tahoe hinge on an expanse of wild grass beneath a somehow American sky you hate the way a hand seems designed to perfectly cover a mouth you hate the fact that you eventually lost countt somewhere around thirty and had to start over that now in our outside summer where wounds are slowly disinfected by sun and breeze you still feel that heat and that the sticker still needs to be there needs to catch the eye with its artificial pink as in a child’s dream of a heart because someone was kidnapped here
Instructions on ROCD / Veronica Vo
carve a circle where there always was one
now it appears only after carved
fill it then empty it then let the body remember before the mind
let the mind circle it
shape yourself into a question
look for the answer
spend the rest of life looking
rest your head in someone’s neck
feel warm
force yourself out of it
be born
be forced out of it
try to tell if you’re having fun
when unable to tell, carve a question out of bone
listen to your bones, even though
plastic replaced broken glass
find rightness in someone else’s warmth
mistake wrongness for solitude for loneliness
for desire for what is real that is real
trust an instinct that doesn’t know itself
let neither mind nor body remember
make peace with the hazy image
don’t know the words but know the song
search in dreams for the answer
for a north star without knowing what a star is
find something close enough
call it a star
let it teach you to breathe
let the answer be enough
let the answer be maybe
My Animal Familiars / Melinda Wilson
When I think about the familiars that populate my life, those
currently at the front of my mind are a pair of domesticated
mammals of a kind. One white with brown spots like a cow
but certainly not. The other charcoal ash black, curly of coat
with sad eyes so emotionally sharp they puncture like a tack.
There were two before them who occupied my heart, a some-
what similar pair of black and white partners in crime, but how
easily angels become thieves when they pass. They took with
them a love I can never get back, a love so particular to them
that I needed to find a brand new kind of care when the others
arrived. Early this morning, I leashed and walked my present
animal familiars, and as we strolled in the quiet streets, most people
still asleep, I found it right there in the sidewalk cracks, a tiny
weed poking through to find its own sun, to drink the night’s dew,
and to grow and grow until there is no space left for the feeling of loss.
