September - Poem 22
Word Play / Laura Bandy
Elephants fear a bee up their trunk.
Truncate a message, something is lost.
Losing’s no disaster, as we’ve been taught.
Tauten up those emotions, life is strange.
Strangers are just friends in process.
Proceed with caution, that last was a fib.
Fibonacci sequence? Who are we kidding?
Kids get it early—nothing will come of nothing.
No thing Cordelia says will please her father.
Fathom a king who rules justly—laughter heals.
Helium rises like a good joke told to a crowd.
Crows gather in branches outside the sleeping house.
Whose house is this? Who’s in charge here?
Hair down to your waist is just asking for trouble.
Treble is high pitch of a scream when you’re grabbed.
Grubby, those hands. Someone’s been in the mud.
Muddles are made when we don’t use our eyes.
I know, I know—sight lines grow smeary in trenches.
Trenchant, the king’s fool—truth’s a dog must to kennel.
Kin can be so tiresome. Well, you can’t choose your family.
Familiarity with the text is optimal but optional.
Options abound—Shakespeare, Bible, Quran, Seuss (Dr.).
Doctor it up, but alone is something you'll be quite a lot!
Lot’s wife was alone when God turned her to salt.
Salting your food is key, but white people forget.
Forgetting is something we’re very good at.
“At this time, I do not recall.” So say we all.
All of this down to playing war. Toddlers with napalm.
Aces palmed. Find a way out of here once crops are planted.
Plant pollinators, let the bees come. And over the Alps, elephants.
Quoted lines from:
Act I, scene 1 (King Lear)
Act I, scene 4 (King Lear )
Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
Underwater / Alicia Boemi
Fall has arrived,
chills in the air;
the lake is now still.
Ice forms around its edges.
Fall progresses to winter,
ice blankets the lake.
Crackling, bubbling, noisy,
underneath the surface
A whole world underwater starts to develop,
waiting to be set free.
I’m reminded of...
me.
Maybe We Shouldn’t Have Let Each Live So Free Their One Wild and Glorious Life / Jesse DeLong
The first one my grandfather shot
while he was trying to break through
the mesh wire of the chicken coop. That rooster
pecked my ankles for years after. An australian shepherd
with one blue and one brown eye got caught
in a bear trap. After my grandfather saved her,
she limped for days before the leg turned
gangrene. Still, on three good paws
she nipped the tires of passing cars
and was allowed in the mudroom
during storms
since she saw our cousin shoot a dog dead
inside our shed. I remember my mom moving
nervously around it but wouldn’t enter
before my grandfather cleaned it.
A brown lab so fat she ate a whole pack
of sausages died from some sort of cancer,
and later for my grandfather’s birthday
we gathered around his hospice bed
as he died, probably from the morphine.
He was embarrassed once when I,
just a child, caught him
smoking a cigarette beside his car. A smaller one,
a terrier, had its guts ripped open
by larger dogs, by other unleashed dogs,
while trying to protect the mother
of its pups, and she, not long after, would be hit
by a car on the same dirt road
where the shepherd harassed our neighbors
on their way to work. And this one, this one
here, can you believe it,
this one who is taken best care of,
who stays inside
most days and sleeps on the couch
and see’s regularly the vet—this one’s allergic to grass.
Tilcayo (A Wayra) / Shelly Krehbiel
We say discovered
as though your snarls were silence
without us. Small one, do not
trust us, keep secret sounds
shadowed in forests beyond us.
Notes:
1. Leopardus tilcayo is a species of tiger cat, the first novel cat species identified in the last 100 years. It lives in the Yungas region of Bolivia. (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)01110-3)
2. The wayra is a poetic form of the Quechua people originating in Peru/Bolivia. Wayra is the word for wind in the Quechua language. It is a syllabic form of five lines. Syllable count is: 5/7/7/6/8. Traditionally it incorporates onomatopoeia within the lines. (https://christinebialczak.com/2024/04/08/looking-at-poems-around-the-world-the-wayra/)
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, / rob mclennan
For the endless, refurbished. Whisper, an approach. Casting decisions. At intervals, directed. Teasers, trailers, leaks. Revisions. Cast, or recast. Not like the books, no. Great, responsibility. Gendered, revelatory. Character driven. Stakeholders, plenty. Buildings topple, rewrite, cameo. Background, purpose. Rhythmic. Echoes, great responsibility. We can begin. To still, get up. To know the scope. Hulk hates fascists, corporate toadies. Refresh, detach. To let clouds enter. (22)
Prose Pilot II / Piper Rasmussen
After Leslie J. Payne Flight Log, circa 1950
I met Airplane Payne on a cloud. He started his usual spiel, telling me to take no chance, but I said just a sec and I took a dive toward the earth. I swooped back up without my plane. Had to drop that off. After that, he decided that we should train as acrobats, so our bodies could be impervious to the sky and the ground. Why would we need planes if we could loop the loop? No more grabbing engines off old crab boats, etc. He promised to make us costumes for it, but he never got the chance. His life went his way, and mine went mine, but it's okay -- last time we talked, he was pitching white lace, and I wanted to dress in harlequin. Our act was doomed from the start.
what a drowned bike doesn't teach / Connor Simons
the first thing you notice is the omnipresence of gray –
what was called life is made into a rotten tooth too
stubborn for extraction – the warped whitewash of multi-
family homes a dazzler of muddied light and sky that
in its blue once held the now-defunct promise
of a glacier’s constant growing and receding the second
thing isn’t color or scene but a muttered ‘jesus’ as you
wonder what would happen if the mountains you know
just gave up one day or even now when the mountains
are a memory what if the river by your house just said
‘enough’ and stopped? so the second thing is your own
fear and the way you’ve always ran to control prep
the sandbags now look up the cost of solar panel
installation plan out your garden and a build a green
house and the third thing is a bike handle jutting up
from a deposit of soil embanked along the contours
of disaster’s temporary river as it flows downhill until
it reaches a terminus of drowning you don’t know
the size of the bike and can only guess its use
maybe a child rode it while hawking sweets to
tourists determined to take pictures from the top
of the world or maybe a mail carrier brought
the news on these wheels threats of ice buckling
in heat rumors of war sodden rice paddies
refusing to drain or more likely it was just laid
there the night before by someone coming home
from work and was simply waiting to become
tomorrow’s rust something piled up with
other drowned things as our refusal to learn’s
body count gluts the expanse of earth
tumbling from highland to low and back again
What rhymes with bad ghazal / Veronica Vo
My parents met her in college, but they had a story
that let them avoid the truth: that we, too, had a story.
One not fun to tell, somewhere between tragic and funny,
but maybe one day I’ll let go of it, this sad story.
For a long time I was afraid, then I wasn’t, and thought
this meant I was cured; my mistake, an iron-clad story.
Funny how the brain rewires itself without you knowing.
Believing I’m in control – just another bad story.
And I know about bad stories. Been telling one for years.
The girl gets the boy/girl. You know the rest, just add story.
Quid Pro Quo / Quid Quid Quid / Melinda Wilson
When the apothecaries of the 14th century, furtively swapped
one drug for another, they excused the abuse by saying they
would go broke if they did not deceive those who required
the medicine just to gut it out for one more day. Even Erasmus
admitted, “quid pro quo, one thing for another. They do
otherwise sell this thing for that.” And so, it would go. Those
who had resources would hoard them and those that did not
would mortgage their homes to find a way, to knuckle down,
and carry on. And so, it went for centuries. Until one cold
and dry winter morning, a man stood on the sidewalk in front
of a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan and thought, “quid
pro quo, one thing for another,” and then he pulled the trigger.
