September - Poem 30

If This Was a Letter, I’d Ask How the Weather Is / a Cento composed by Laura Bandy

with lines chosen and written by: Connor Simons, Jesse DeLong, Veronica Vo, rob mclennan, Piper Rasmussen, Alicia Boemi, Shelly Krehbiel, Laura Bandy, Melinda Wilson

The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down
and ancestors speak through this ground you stand on.

These scraps of humanity, assembled. Chorus, yes
but you are sleeping. You do not want to believe.

It is
the end of a haunted night,
as no party lasts long enough to keep us
and the bruise waits ‘til morning.

And so,
fall progresses to winter
all of this
the kind of thing you commit to in November,
when the rains come in.

Didn’t you pray to your maker?
Didn’t you plead that there might
be another day waiting for you?
Didn’t you seek out the sun,
which will light your path to safety
like in the aisle of an airplane 
in uncontrolled descent?

Because calling this survival is generous.
It’s just
Death blowing you a kiss.

So I’ll wrap you around my neck,
and take you everywhere with me
the heart wafting, sort of like the blood in water.

Who is speaking, please.

Moon Dream / Laura Bandy

The moon
followed me to work this morning. Then
I saw a sun-toasted cornstalk shooting up
through concrete on my two-lane commute.
“You don't belong here,” 
I scolded both
night star and field crop,
for finding themselves out of place. 

When
teachers gave me a bathroom pass
in secondary, I would take it,
intentions pure, then somehow end up 
at the in-between spaces:
stairwells, wood shop alcove, rooftop door. 

There would be 
no one there but me,
and once, a baby possum
wedged down between concrete columns
outside the art class darkroom.
"Beat it," I said, "this is my turf."
"I'm here for the still life class,
he replied, lighting up a cigarette.
"No one can freeze like me." 

“You shouldn’t smoke in here,” I said,
but you can't tell a talking possum anything.
Just like you can't
scream in a dream, not really.
Or like when you're driving 
And realize you've gone 50 miles
but you don't remember any of it—
cracked road, semis and tractors
out for harvest, even crossing the bridge
over the Illinois River, dotted with barges.

You know
you were there 
because now you're here, 
on the other side—

moon disappeared, highway smooth
from where yellow vests came in overnight
and covered holes over with new pavement.
Some say green cheese or Swiss the surface
all those fissures, lobes, ravines, even lunar seas
which are dark, low-lying, and fathoms deep.

A Chill  / Alicia Boemi

Here we are again.
Borrowed 

light, 

time,  

space.

Fall becomes us. 
Winter is approaching soon. 

The water is colder;
the ice will form against the shoreline;
against the rocks’ will.

And I take cover.

Teaching Lessons in Pest Control /  Jesse DeLong

The termite inspector noted that the hydrangea
is growing too wild
too close
to the house, and must be pruned,
and so too do I
put on this nice, collared shirt
and khaki pants
unless the wood-rot of my personality
decides to feed. 

After On the Nature of Daylight (Max Richter) /  Shelly Krehbiel

Are you the sunrise-oranges just above
the mountains? I’m driving through the valley.
It’s been less than an hour, but it feels like
the whole night. It’s gone from dark to foggy
to now – this light starting with a brilliance
I never wake to see. And though I can’t
see the river, I know it’s near, because
fog follows the path it makes. Fog is still
here, but close to the ground now. It feels blue,
though I know fog doesn’t have a color.
Are you the blue-drifting fog of morning?
Are you starlight that’s not here anymore
breaking through? Do you know what I mean-
like just after it’s too light to see stars?

It's just after it’s too light to see stars,
but they still seem close, like a flash-echo
after the photo is taken. I am
taking a photo of these colors now
without a camera, without a phone, with
just my whole self. Like when I memorized
sunrises as a kid. I still keep one -
violet purple behind a single tree.
Was I the tree? Was I the purple sky
not knowing I could hold all that amaze
around a tree’s silhouette on flat plains
of earth still mysteried with night? I do
not have to remember this. It’s here:
your sunrise-oranges wondering the sky.

Cento, September,  /  rob mclennan

Dear poets of September. All the same trips, story. Goodbye, melodramatic. Propel, had blown a kiss. This, a generative. Bread, baked fresh and hero, dinosaur. Glorious, and grey. A dead sparrow, hyssop shoots. So many, in relation. In relationships. Impervious to sky. Omnipresent. Another wanting, itself. Held, as promise, sonnet. Dear, what have you done for. Impulse, to forgive. Dear John. Asleep, am through with you. Each figure, soars. The title of this poem, elephants. Positions, in. The lake, still. Another warning. To save our whole lives. On three good paws, silence. A cinematic future. Can I get a hell, yeah.

final words. It’s simple, really. Stay  / Piper Rasmussen

Cento with lines & title from Laura Bandy, rob mclennan, Connor Simons, Melinda Wilson, Alicia Boemi, Veronica Vo, Jesse DeLong, and Shelly Krehbiel

Mark every beat, set everything aloud.
to cram that yellow into a lightless space
breath, heavy and rough without delicacy 
beyond the pines into the needle-filled forest floor,
The fallout is terrible. Trust me, I know,
Not the pill and its euphoric promise, but the hard, chalky 
memory. Or maybe some memories upside down, some still becoming. 
Step over, no need for mercy, the cicada, rattling its death song on the walkway. 

an ekphrasis from the land of Uz  / Connor Simons

Same old story / Veronica Vo

We were just girls
the time she told me
or didn’t say it directly,
not really, just that
she had been at a frat house.
The drink she drank was
not the drink she thought.
There was a couch.
There were men. Boys.
There is blue in my memory.
I think I put it there.
My party girl always
beautiful, brilliant.
The sun might have been out.
Who knows. I wish
it mattered.

When You Cite the Book of Revelations    /  Melinda Wilson

We suspect you’re in a cult.  
If you want to die in a cadre,  
go ahead. You will still be alone.  
You can follow a moon and get  
lost. We won’t attempt to find you.  
To begin a sentence with the phrase,  
For holy reasons, is to prepare a red carpet 
for the lie. The truth is that the local church boys 
think guns are cool, even after the parishioner’s spine 
is split from its stem. The paranoia of the mass only grows,  
bores deeper into the rod of iron and settles into your porous bones.