September - Poem 6

Harebrained Scheme / Laura Bandy

The more I read about rabbits,
the less I like them.

Hares, on the other foot,
interest me exceedingly.

What most don’t know
is the difference. Bunnies

burrow in the dirt, make
homes in cold soil. That’s

called hiding, right?
Hares may be a solitary species,

but at least they live
and scamper above ground. Some

poet, I forget who,
praised the creature, (a dog, maybe?)

who never crept,
never crept, never crept. The truth

is poets are forgettable,
just like most life. I might mean

lives. In college, my
apartment had once been occupied

by Hugh Hefner,
a selling point the realtor made sure

to talk up. It was
a walk-up, and friends and I spent most time

on the roof with coke and
rum, throwing water balloons at the stars.

Someone found a board
one night that seemed sturdy, “sea-worthy,”

we said, and placed wood
across air three stories up, a pirate ship plank

connecting roofs. Tipsy,
we sashayed across, no fuzzy bunny ears perched

but a strut implied. I
don’t remember thinking I could die or pondering

eternal return, but what
was in my small brain then? Rabbits clock 1.8 grams

cerebrum, while hares
come in at 3.0. Oh, these gray cells, these scurries,

these schemes! And what
do you know? The stars looked the same on the other

side— shiny and so close—
not hurtling towards earth, not already dying.

Micro Love / Alicia Boemi

Of all the things I have forgotten, 
I will never forget, 
or regret, 
you.

Because AI-Generated Food Loves Zero-Shaped Shrimp /  Jesse DeLong

From a colony on the moon, 
robots won’t eat
a glug of oil
like on the Jetson’s, but instead crave
the worm-like strings of cornbread,
how all rice and chicken crust
resemble maggots. 
From a colony on the moon
the colon
is in all patterns of speech,
as well as lists of three
and a particular typo 
to pass
as human. And if there is a bird
it will be, unlike the conspiracies say,
left alone, and prone
to fluttering, and real. 

Thirteen After One /  Shelly Krehbiel

The mural of Marge Simpson stares from across the street
like she is watching the one-way traffic drive away,
bumper stickers, license plates, tail lights always leaving.
She never sees them coming, never sees who decides
to take that street on a Saturday afternoon. Just
their head-tops. A bit of hair just over the headrest.
Sometimes a child turns around in their seat, notices
her slight smile, the great height of her signature blue hair
stretched up the building nearly to the roof, taking up
as much space as the rest of her. The child keeps watching
a long time, long for a child, before other buildings
cut Marge from view. So much depends on time and distance.
When did I stop looking back for you and turn around?

Mark Goldstein, Roblin Lake, /  rob mclennan

Left behind by glaciers. Soluble, water-logged. Game, to recognize game. This handmade quality of syntax. A flourish, of hardscrabble. Hewn logs, by the boundaries. Hammer, hold. This widespread mortality. Lake, a loon’s call. Ethos, each structural division. Of going on, without one’s knowledge. An outhouse, closed. This grey shape, framed by leaves. Little point of land. A can of beer, on sun-drenched deck. To ask this of poetry, sport. The local library. Remembering the world. His world, specifically. Al Purdy’s Ameliasburgh; such calm, warm water. A fossil lake, which corresponds to this sentence.

Storytelling  / Piper Rasmussen

Chen, Crow's Foot
flow, Fermi,
Venn, Feyman, 
box-and-whisker, bar:
tell me the story, Papa, 
how you would start the counting & separation 
machines first-thing in the morning, 
stumbling out of bed into a warm house. 
Tell me about the buttons on the sides
again! The lit power
& file & edit & the
warrens of mice
helpfully messengering 
instants, instantly --
about the processing power of the millions
of others in other homes working alongside
you, and their categories, their different 
roles & waters, their undersea cables 
and satellites
before the snarl
for a time
singly & together
charted 

parsing recovery / Connor Simons

you hear the garbage cans rustling at night and it might be the wind or it might be a starving fox – recovery goes back to healing recovrer: coming back to consciousness   rising off the sickbed and becoming yourself again – the word alcoholic gnaws down might be until it’s the marrow of is – healthy and able to work   to be a good husband – didn’t you spend each day after the first beer showing the ragged clot in your heart to anyone close enough to see the space between your ribs? – that body on the bed wasn’t you   those feet crashing into the side table as your spouse was sleeping weren’t your feet – aren’t there days when you need the world to watch the clot untangle? to watch the starving fox that haunts your life snarl at the aluminum frame you’ve trapped it in? – that box of knives rattling in the hollow of your larynx belonged to someone else – don’t you want them to know beneath this covering that is your everyday life is a set of teeth and claws   matted fur and hunger   yellow eyes glowing at night like marsh lights guiding you to the depths out past the reedy shallows?

Venn Diagram Retrospective / Veronica Vo

The Giraffes    /  Melinda Wilson

I’m on the treadmill and thinking 
about how useful longer legs  
would be. I wouldn’t have to scale  
the grocery store shelves or throw  
heavy but unripe oranges towards  
the pack of Scotch-Brite that I need  
to scrub the grout above the shower- 
head where the tile meets the wall.  
Such a task would require a step ladder 
if not for my newfangled, long, and  
commodious legs. My pitching arm 
is out of practice, but I still get  
the sponges eventually. The legs  
I imagine I now have, as I pick up  
my pace, increase the incline and sweat  
beads on my face, these courtly legs  
are without nerve damage or shin  
splits. Not like my everyday stock legs,  
on which I now run. However long  
I could grow them, they aren’t fit  
for running, not really. Too wooden  
and awkward, and if they must be  
wooden, then certainly not toothpicky  
enough, not like the giraffes’ my friend  
tells me about. They graze outside  
the window of his parents’ hotel at Disney’s  
Animal Kingdom Lodge. The giraffes  
delight his mother, and I am suddenly  
envious of so much. His mother’s love  
for these odd animals. The giraffes’ Tim  
Burton legs, how they are a little like  
they are not for this earth, as these legs  
are not for running on this treadmill.  
And that’s to say nothing of the neck.