September - Poem 23
When I am Asked What It's Like Being a Stepmom and Instead of Answering I Tell a Story / Laura Bandy
—for Titus
Sara was my favorite barista at the Chicago coffee shop I managed in my twenties. Eyes so light a blue it seemed you could walk through them like a waterfall, freckles everywhere as though someone had blown her a kiss with a handful of turbinado sugar, and a wild crop of curls the color of dusty corn cob, husk stripped, usually on the top of her head in a teetering mop. She was electricity in human form, a live wire who seemed to do the lindy hop while steaming milk, pouring perfect cappuccinos with the froth forming a white apple just so. Once, she came into the café for a shift wearing a hot pink tee that said TATE on it, and I asked if it was a band I’d not heard of yet. She pulled my face to her own so that our foreheads touched, her hands cupping my cheeks, and whispered, “It’s art, Bandy, on the modern tip.” Then, slowly, punctuating each word like a balloon popping, her breath hazelnut from the sweet lattes she sipped all through her shifts, she said louder, “Art. ART!” then shrugged and stepped back. “That’s what we’re here for.” She was a set designer for plays and sometimes drew murals for the café, patrons sipping and watching while she created strange vistas in muted colors—mossy greens and bloodletter reds, chatting amiably with coffee heads all the while—sometimes pausing to laugh with her whole body, bending backwards and whooping at the ceiling, hair flying everywhere, even into the paint.
One evening, the night crew invited us morning workers to a barbeque. They were so much cooler than us, real Chicago kids, unlike the early birds like me who all seemed to be transplants from elsewhere. They were known to be a fast crowd, vampiric in their hours and partakers of all the 90’s party drugs, living in city neighborhoods, never the suburbs. When we arrived, someone was grilling radicchio which turned out to be a bitter-buttery perfect bite, and candle-lit lanterns hung on origami strings above our heads; crane, boat, lantern, the pattern. The tree branches that swayed above were leaf-festooned as though in fluttering party frocks—a secret green space that felt our own little lush islet.
I was surprised by Sara, usually so voluble and effervescent at parties, a bubble water in the flavor everyone most wants to drink; but that night she was quiet, shy-seeming, sitting at the table patiently with a piece of paper naming a celebrity taped to her head. The game was loud, all the night crowd shouting over each other, and Sara’s smile was one I’d never seen on her face before, like an apostle just favored with a holy task. Our hosts were meeting her for the first time and seemed to enjoy teasing her: nudging her shoulder, asking about her most recent play, wondering how she was rolling in Rogers Park, where another barista had just been held up at gunpoint walking home but it had all turned out okay.
Sara smiled through the ribbing, sometimes looking above our heads at the lanterns, swaying back and forth in the black night sky, and at the stars like iridescent fish swimming above us in time to Charles Mingus on the hi-fi. Later, we rode home together on the L, both heading north to our beds. I asked if she had had a good time at the party and why she had been so quiet. Sara was drawing on the windows of our train’s car, her forefinger making shapes in the condensation: kites, stars, even an octopus. “I’m the youngest, you know,” she said, “the family surprise—my sisters and brothers have over a decade on me.” Her window art became loops, spirals like an ocean’s whirlpool. “They had whole lives before I arrived,” she said, “and so I waited until they asked, always.” She drew a little boat on her ocean, gave it a sail. “I wanted to be in the game, so I stayed quiet until they chose me.” Turning in my direction, Sara drew a wet heart on my forehead with her fingertip, then another on her own. “I’m so glad to be here,” she said. “I’m just so goddamn glad to be here.
Dark Force / Alicia Boemi
I often forget,
I lose myself in your arms.
Why do I keep coming back?
In the darkness, I try to let go,
but
something always propels me,
at you,
a dark force.
And so I ask-
is this the only love I get in a lifetime?
Jesus Loves Me This I Know / Jesse DeLong
The mom of my friend ran
a daycare in her house where
I wore a red cape all day.
Her sister that worked there told me
she didn’t believe
in hell, though I watched her son string up
and torture a grasshopper,
and later that day the grandmother
told me I could eat the crust
because the bread was baked fresh,
but they stopped letting me
write stories with their son
because of the violence in them.
The only line
I remember is our hero running
from a cave where he’d just encountered
a dinosaur, yelling, “It’s godzilla’s dog.”
They took me one weekend
to their church and after asked the pastor
to save my soul. They’d let me
place the five dollar bill in the collection plate.
I don’t remember anyone singing.
Later, they would sell the house
to a family that raised wolves
and we would drive by and watch the animals
pace the fence, their coats shiny
and glorious and grey.
Let me give this to you / Shelly Krehbiel
He stands between harmony and exile
as though it is a choice. Let me give this to you,
he says. If anyone was there, they could not
be seen. He is only a boy. He is a good,
grateful boy. Why must every good thing
be broken, be taken away?
If anyone was there, they could see a stone
in his hand, a piece of quartz, rose quartz
with jagged, shiny edges. Did you think
it would be smooth, that stone?
Did you think he had found it in a park,
a stream? I thought so.
I want him to have a round stone, want
him to be giving it to someone he sees, a kind
ghost-dog, an invisible angel. A round stone
would fit so easily in his hand, would keep
its warmth and hold it like a gift. I want
him to know kindness.
He stands there a long time. He cannot
choose who he goes home to. He is not
holding out his hand. The points of stone
are pink in his palm, his fingers. Let me
give this to you, he whispers. Did you think
someone would answer?
Shine on, you crazy diamond, / rob mclennan
A moral commitment, to trees. This post, totally verbs. A continued, accumulated need. Contradictions are many. Infinite, newsy. Earl Grey Arnold Palmer. Tacky, rude, and beloved.
Prose Pilot III / Piper Rasmussen
The pilots on this commercial flight are twins. They like to riff off one another. They both went to the Air Force Academy, but one went to the Academy to be an engineer, and the other wanted to fight a war. Neither got what they wanted, but they both got licenses. They decided to take their show on the road on the preflight announcement circuit in 1999. One tells only the truth and one likes to ask the passengers to hold elections. Sometimes one will use a high voice and the other will use a low voice. When they have different voices, different people laugh, and they share a goal of fair skies.
what i don’t say when someone asks if i want children / Connor Simons
yesterday a dead sparrow tangled in hyssop shoots a case of avian flu and the parched darkness on drought maps deepens every day here’s the thing speaking to the dead doesn’t take much practice their voice has already burrowed in the dark of my ear and bringing up the body is no different than humming a lullaby my mother sang for me when my tired arms beat back sleep but speaking to the never-to-be is something else like the way making a heart a metaphor is easier than seeing it for what it is a sinewy vessel sustained by air-suffused blood and electric current so i use what tongue i have and know that some gaps are never closed easy words like confession or sorry and confession comes from confiteri to acknowledge and so i acknowledge you now outside the quiet spaces where one partner says to the other no and the other nods and there’s no need to explain because look around i acknowledge you and take away the public demurrals and the world will see the way a wildfire can keep burning underneath snowpack will see the way people instinctively gather together when they flee will see the way soil can crack at angles that destroy any hope of soft but the world will never see you because there’s nothing there except this acknowledgement and the bone deep knowing of every poem’s lack
Closed mouth that gets fed / Veronica Vo
after Little Shop of Horrors
People are too easy. They just want things
and the mere act of wanting makes them think
they deserve it. I knew this guy that liked a girl
in a bad relationship. He never would have been
brave enough to do anything about it. But after
the abusive boyfriend died, the guy fed him
to me and acted like he was doing something
righteous. All justification happens in retrospect.
Then he fed his own father to me. And eventually,
the woman he loved. Some love. What he loved
most was what he wanted, which is another way
to say what people love most is the wanting itself.
Lovesick Teen Shoots Up School / Melinda Wilson
We can say that our impulse is to forgive.
Austin Bomber Was Nerdy and Kind.
Or we can tell the truth. The police bought
Dylann Roof a hamburger, after he killed
nine people in a local church, because
he said he was hungry. Nine Black
parishioners dead at Bible study because
he wanted to ignite a race war. But sure,
the bug-eyed boy with a bowl haircut who
came from a broken home and attended
at least seven schools in nine years was
hungry, so get him a hamburger. Get him
a hamburger, but don’t forget that Evaline
Hilda Burkitt was force fed 292 times
for the crime of political agitation.
A state-sanctioned torture called the Cat
and Mouse Act, established to punish
women who wanted the vote. And don’t
forget that after ICE agents murdered
Alex Pretti, firing ten shots in under five
seconds into the ICU nurse, the Trump
administration repeatedly referred to him as a domestic terrorist. So, please forgive me,
but the title of this poem is actually
After months of Aggressive Advances,
Incel Targets and Kills Classmate
to Feel Powerful Like a Fucking Prick.
