September - Poem 24

Sep 24

Road Trip Noir / Laura Bandy

To get to Vermont, you first must pass some time in Akron. At the hotel,
two Dobermans in shock collars guard the desk where the owner stands, gray

ink over hard arms and crawling up his neck onto a shaved head. He tells me
he's in recovery when he hands me my room key, then reminds me the ice

machine's out of service. I ask where I can get a pop and he blinks twice, like
an eye agreement you make when your tongue's cut out. "Stop and Go

across the way," he says. "Watch yourself crossing the highway." I dodge
cars like Frogger and make it okay. The cashier says she can tell I'm not

from around here. I ask what gave me away and she huffs while handing me
my Squirt and a lighter. "You got that lost look," she says, then winks before

waving through the next in line. It's nine or ten at night, moon sliced right
in half and hole-punched in the black sky. Back in the hotel parking lot, I squat

on a thin stone parking block, yellow paint faded into the gray, and start up
a cigarette before bed. No one knows exactly where I am, no one could find me

if they tried. Tomorrow, I'm meant to arrive in a different state but the smoke
I'm blowing seems to ring me in place. It's only temporary, though. No trace.

The Sunset Continues in Another Part of the Country / Jesse DeLong

Cento Title and Lines from Wetherington, Ford, Alam, Arendt, Alam, Graeber and Wengrow, Lin, Brown, Simmonds, Simmonds, Persson, Graeber and Wengrow, Tolbert, Fontaine, Tokarczuk translated by Croft, Tolbert, Jess, Khajavi, Miranda, Bennett, Brooks, Tsushima translated by Harcourt, Herbert, Cowles, Plumly, Leilani, Roberson, Sharma, Tsushima translated by Harcourt, Fontaine, Wetherington, Ford, Graeber and Wengrow, Boyle, Boyle, Ward, Ford, Leilani, Dimkovska, Morrison, Als and Leilani

After the long, warm night of their drive,
proximity to the ocean always made her so tired.
Rootlessness as a conscious aim,
the kind of story they didn’t want their life stories to be:
(fir, spruce, redwood, yew and cedar)
the trees took up more space at night; the shadows added to their volume.

Shore birds have taken to the porch, again.
Each voice shapehifts
exits the body a procession of elemental sonances,
quiet if there is one.

There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world.
The conclusive shape of happiness/ is a triangle
a kind of collective story they told together.

Exotic as a salamander,
confession is the logical opposite/ of light.
A writhing, and then a rapture—
the ground why we desire our own room
any language so long as they all say goodbye.

But what values?
Life must be aromatic,
desire must be released with no resistance—
a blister, all that was left of some lost yesterday.
High enough for landscape.

And, finally, an apology:
of a call, of a conversation, of a girl on the other end.
The dark drawer
of dreary, ugly ideas, of nonsense.
Yet he didn’t even have the name he needed
to carve you out of your life.

The carrion birds help/ still their circle,
master of flouts and jeers,
the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre.

The moon is a parched place.
The moon pulls water towards itself.
The termites writhe in their ruined home.

He was killed, two months later, cleanly, by a bullet.

Even as we look at each other through borrowed faces,
we forget that we exist
there is a cold place one-half inch in any direction.
That is the true nature of difference.

All of it, even the love, is a violence.

Aubade to Autumn (A Demi-sonnet) / Shelly Krehbiel

Is it sacrilegious to choose the sun
instead of weeping, to crave abundance
instead of blaming myself for dancing
in the grass for no one, not even bees,
not even love. I resist the question.
Often, I am too tired to dance, and soon
it will be difficult to find warmth too.

The Buffalo Poetics Program, / rob mclennan

Dismantled. An insistence, shrill. How much gets purposeful, destroyed. A wall of nothing. To rebuild, lay out defeat. Crafted, dissolution. Lay down, think a speech. A long line takes a line long down. What plenitude, such twilight soup. Clemency, requires witness. Wellness, thus. By no means, heart. Pull, pull up. Distinguished chair. Of fireworks, or cunning. Fate. Lament, to rest in silence. Urgent. Strive for wanting, bitter. Further, pints. Of Robert Creeley, Steve McCaffery, Susan Howe. Charles Bernstein. Jessica Smith, where I first heard. An autopsy, words.

ZINEMAKER CENTO / Piper Rasmussen

Lines from The East Village Inky #71, Thirteen Facts #26, Pencil Revolution Vol. 1 No. 5, Misfit Cinema Journal July 2025 aka Workprint #4, and Simple Steps to A Life Less Shitty: The Big Sad Sequel by Adam Gnade

You're home.
experiences and obscure cultural

created over 300 paintings of mushrooms
on view to anyone visiting today

real fun -- dealing all the
safety harness, helmet, & experienced guide

may or may not have been “published” out of their offices after-hours
could possibly cure

and I would definitely be first in line to
get up to the front door.

a) Salisbury steak on a plate b) Mom's homemade Beef Stroganoff
we left no stone unturned in our hunt for graphic smut!

(Dodo : 1960s = Polar bear : now.)
the child stars of ZOOM!

is awesome and kind of adorable, but it
all do it for you,

working constantly
melonfarming long. I got caught up

eight thousand copies
pencil factory, pencil aficionados

It occurs to me that I could ease up a
Like Kenny Loggins once sang, "I'm going

down on the floor. She looks up at me with her little face and tells me "rheeeeeeeh" (I
you just gotta

the best in the land
I am chemically allergic to the phrase "my happy place”

and what the smell of wood and river water
5) Be a warm, golden sun to those around you.

FIENDISH IS THE WORD FOR IT
Diligence, clear perspective, and good ideas will

their level. They are meant to be a fun
Whatever, it's fine.

love poem (after Hayes, after Lorca) / Connor Simons

I want to walk and notice always the way a child
toddles towards its future. I want to name birds.
I want to wear a shirt made of morning glory petals.

I want to one day be older than my mother was
when she died and then outlive her father as well

and to forget that goal when the day passes. If squirrels
remember where they cached winter’s food, then I want
to wake each morning and see the sweet down that pastures

the point where your neck becomes chest. I want to
kiss you. I want you to laugh your stained-glass laugh

when we wait for the bus. I want you to see how
your hair won’t ever gray but will become summer
lightning. I want to feel lightning on my tongue

and I want to hide in the basement when the siren
blares and the sky turns green, the thrum and blare

sending the cat to wherever it scuttles behind the drywall
and I want to be that prefabricated cavern, that place

we never see but sense anyway the lure of quiet
and dark, spiderwebs and a feeling of rightness in being
there. If a honeysuckle can return each year, then I

want the name you would give me, to roll it in
on the ground like I would the marbles my father gave

me so kids in the complex wouldn’t think I’m weird.
I want to know what rain knows and be the constancy
of mason bees building mud homes each November. I

want to be in a room and know you where there. I want
to be the oddness of your fingers holding a sewing

needle. I want your mouth in my palm and to see
how my flesh can blossom into the first lilac sprig

of spring. I want to be the vase, but not the water.
I do not want to be pages left curling in the sun,
ink wilting into a dry liquid blur. I do not want

to be a book. When I let go of this body, my love,
I want to be the first breath of morning in your mouth.

Everyone went to bingo / Veronica Vo

There’s a zombie outbreak in Raccoon City. It’s obvious to anyone that’s not a character in the story but not to the characters. People never call things what they are before they’re sure. So there’s just an outbreak. We don’t know what’s wrong, only that something is wrong. Very wrong. Your mom starts forgetting words to everyday things. It only happens every once in a while, so nothing’s really wrong. Yet. A regular guy is dispatched to Raccoon City to deliver a package. He doesn’t know what he’s about to get into. He doesn’t know his life is about to have a before and after. That there’s quite some time between when he gets bitten and when he turns, time in which he knows what will happen but is still able to ignore it. Proceed as usual. Your mom starts calling you the wrong name. It takes her a minute to correct herself. It’s interesting because she named you. When regular guy sees the zombie virus at work, up close and personal, he says interesting. Interesting as another way to say heartbreaking, even if he doesn’t realize it yet. There’s really nothing he can do besides live until the virus controls him completely. In that kind of situation, when all the buildings are on fire and the cars have piled up onto each other in the roads. No time to ruminate. If you stop moving you die. The once-human, once-familiar creatures will get him with their tentacles and teeth and faces that unfold into flowers. Your mom watches informational videos on Alzheimer’s out loud. Your friend has just pulled up outside to take you to the movies. In a city far away, beyond the scope of being your problem, something is very wrong. Some kind of outbreak in Raccoon City. There’s nothing we regular guys can do.

Das Lied von der Erde / Melinda Wilson

When Gustav Mahler sat down at his Larkin Secretary desk
to write The Song of the Earth, he knew it would be agony.
Dipping his pen into the inkwell, he pulled from deep memory
the days each of his six siblings had died. Then, from another

lockbox of the mind, the day his own young daughter died
of scarlet fever materialized. Her sandpaper rash, a pink-red
eruption growing down her neck and chest. Her strawberry
tongue could have been a product of the pear drops she sucked,

but not this time. Dark is life, dark is death. Mahler wept.
To get out of his head, he retreated to the seclusion
of the Austrian countryside, to walk and walk and walk
among the tragedy of the Alpine peaks. The ancient forests

would soothe his aching heart. There the sky is forever blue,
and the earth / will long stand firm, and blossom in spring.
There Mahler wrote and wrote and wrote. Such contrast
to the days he spent on the stage conducting his masterpieces.

Rapt audiences overcome with grief as they listened to his
composition. Controlling the orchestra using only his piercing
eyes, Mahler bred pure tension, until, conducting the New York
Philharmonic, he collapsed and said, I am coming to you,
homely place of rest.

Kirsten Miles