September - Poem 26
Tibetan Prayer Flag / Laura Bandy
Let’s begin by telling about the spiders. She hangs
a flag across basement vent-windows to try
and forget that she lives in a basement, however
prettily named a garden flat. You can picture it—
squares of thin fabric—cotton, maybe—blue, white,
red, green, gold, swung on a slender thread of hemp,
precisely the kind of décor you would expect from
a small-town girl transplanted to the big city and eager
to demonstrate that she gets what matters. Peace
and freedom for Tibet and its fine people all the way
across oceans in … Asia, maybe? Soon she needs
to figure out where the L is, and how to ride it, but there
are cinder block walls and low-hanging ceiling pipes
to paint first, in the brightest shades she can find
on sale—terra cotta for the kitchen, pool blue
for the lounge as her new Australian friend calls
the living room which is also the whole apartment.
“The worry is the coyote,” Evan says, having stopped
off in Santa Clara for a few years before landing
in Chicago, and lost his small dog, Pablo, to howling
brush wolves. She agrees—there are some things
that trouble—like how her car doors won’t open anymore
and hoisting body through the rolled down glass
in her first city winter is getting dicey, icicles sharp
and snagging on her clothes, still: when she looks up
at tall buildings lit within and stamped against gray late
November clouds, feels the brisk wind off Lake Michigan
that bends her body back nearly in half, the sense of what
could happen (anything, anything) always stops her breath,
steals it right from her mouth like helium sucked from a
party balloon to make a voice squeak. One side of the flag
is wavering but there is no breeze, windows closed against
the cold, so she goes to adjust, reaches up to fuss with how
the wind horse prayer panel hangs crooked, and as she
touches, so lightly, the cloth’s edge, it dissolves, liquefies,
and 1000 parachuting baby spiders launch beside her Midwest
apple cheeks: some brush skin, catch in her hair, most ride air.
—quoted line by Evan Harrison, from Sham City
Take Hold / Alicia Boemi
The waves hold me
the depths I feel
clinging tightly
underwater
take hold
please never let go
On Minor Talents / Jesse DeLong
1.
“If you ask me, that’s another ‘not-deer,’” she said, “Look carefully at its coat.” But of course the photo I was looking at was just a deer in molting season and she wouldn’t explain what she meant by “not-deer.” There was mold growing over a half-eaten bowl of casserole, the mold not unlike the clumps of deer fur. “My son took this photo,” she bragged.
2.
Every Christmas her mother made a special cake, layerings of decoration, for them to sing happy birthday to Jesus. “That is,” she said, “if my mother came out from under the bed that day.” Some days she would just bend over, speak to her mother under the frame.
3.
Mushrooms grew out of the wall near her bathtub. They curled up, looking for the sun. She was a raw foodist who believed you could absorb the entirety of your nutrients from walking outside on a cloudless day. I once watched her roll off a couch, wine glass in hand. She stood, bowed, and took a sip of her drink. Not a drop on the floor.
We’d love to know what you think! (an email) / Shelly Krehbiel
My absence will be my presence, / rob mclennan
A subject of, instep. Of galaxies. Flesh. Each structural division. To enter one’s skull. Only language, seduces. Doomscroll. Place the body a book, a displacement. A handful, of coin. Having never received. This trick, to be literal. This line has a skin, epidermal. A hard rain might fall. This poem, concedes. Conjectures. To the nature of moon, sun surface. A line in the sand. Pockmarked, with cloud. Sifting hands, sight. Repeating, the singular. Not everything empties. Canadian hybrid, incorporating. Unfolding a portrait. I wish to hear, hear your voice. Speak.
My Life Flashes Before My Eyes / Piper Rasmussen
the Goldberg Variations as performed by Glenn Gould / Connor Simons
it is 8:04 PM on a Friday and i’m listening to the Goldberg Variations while my spouse is stretched out on the couch watching George Santos collapse into a mud puddle for money and camera time he’s such a sack of shit and the Variations are odd because they aren’t religious no mass or homily here no Luther glowering from a pulpit just the way we want the heart to be a tunable machine capable of being what we need it to be the dog next to my spouse is getting older at the park today her hips seemed to turn inward and she would just stop and stare at nothing or maybe stare at whatever trace the geese leave behind as they head south does he ever stop lying? and do i? if my fingers could speak i would want them to always have the perfect tension between the tenor and the alto but these fingers have made mistakes played keys disastrously out of tune and dissonances designed only to hurt and not resolve and now George Santos is sliding off the pier into the water and oh my god is he fucking smiling as the British drill sergeant screams at him and the hand crossing of the fifth variation begins
T-minus / Veronica Vo
I keep looking for the bomb, can hear the ticking
No one in the house acknowledged it until today
I could have asked why but I didn’t, couldn’t feel my hands
If I ask, that means I know she knows, which means we all know
The thing is that the bomb can’t be dismantled
You just have to live with it and listen to it tick,
can only learn about how how to prepare for the inevitable
So I didn’t ask where the bomb is – I know she knows I know
My Own Desert Places / Melinda Wilson
with thanks to Robert Frost
I met a young writer today.
She was writing about solitude
The solitude in Dickinson
compared to the way it presents
its thesis in the writing of Simone
Weill. The imagination has not
space to imagine itself
when we need each other’s
company. I want You to feel
distracting, like all I can look
at is you standing against
the door jamb. But Simone.
Simone would have us
alone. According to Simone,
we need an empty room to be
stable or aware of our conscience.
We couldn’t let a lover distract
our rational mind. The clarity
of loneliness. Yet—-some would
argue that being lonely is distraction,
it’s own lark to disguise the hole
in the heart that will- eventually-
kill you. Or, I mean, will kill me.
I hope our death will not be lonely.
