Welcome to the 30/30 Project, an extraordinary challenge and fundraiser for Tupelo Press, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary press. Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a “poetry marathon,” writing 30 poems in 30 days, while the rest of us “sponsor” and encourage them every step of the way.
The volunteer poets for October are Lilly Frank, Anna Ojascastro Guzon, Kathryn Johnson, Kimberly McElhatten & H.T. Reynolds!
If you’d like to volunteer for a 30/30 Project month, please fill out our application and warm up your pen!
September - Poem 16
Twelve Years old / Yael Aldana
I dropped my purse under
the bleachers
of the traveling circus
Tammy’s lone white socked
foot hangs down
me under the bleachers
looking
shows me where
we were sitting
where the wayward purse
might be
where I’m going.
when I walk down the hill
to ride with Tammy to school
I think of mongooses
I see one run across the road
or maybe I imagined it
I don’t remember.
I go to Tammy’s house
to listen to her comedy record
Her mother is bathing her
fourteen-year-old brother with
Cerebral palsy on their back porch
that sits on the beach
His legs crossed
s blunted attempt
to hide his bare flesh.
His mother walks away
I don’t know where Tammy
is. I look towards the ocean
An eagle ray swims in the shallows
The tips of his wings break the surface
I don’t know if her brother sees
what I see.
Nights Before Lexapro / Catherine Bai
I was the incessant ringing of a telephone without the telephone, I was the glow of a computer screen without the computer, I was the impossible instant before a sound is made. When did I learn to turn pure potential into a steel trap, to make freedom into a fossil? When did I learn to lure the future into the very breath I’m breathing, to fish the past from the safety of having happened into the possibility of happening? I wish I could describe what dread is: the absence between the past and future that supersedes the present.
The Secret Life of Milkweed / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
Since we are speaking of plants, let me ask you about milkweed.
Last week, I brushed its leaves and a current tore through me
fingers to crown to soles and back again. I was barefoot in the dirt,
baby balanced on my hip. Was it the soil, some invisible chemistry
of burrowing creatures? Static in the charged dusk air? Or something else
a language I almost understood
I searched for it: tropical milkweed vibrating, magical properties of milkweed.
The internet offered only butterflies, wing-deep in thirst.
How do we know when something is magic? When it answers us back,
or when it leaves us even more hungry?
In the yard, buckets of animal dung ripen to soil.
Banana peels, eggshells steep in glass jars of rainwater.
Under the full moon I make rings of salt
for my loved ones to stand inside. I never told anyone this,
but when my son was new, I wanted to lick him clean
the way cats baptize their young
as if my body held the last true water.
By morning, the bucket of milkweed had toppled into mud.
Each stalk bent, waterlogged, the flowers gone slack.
I lift them, repack with soil, pour rice water,
lay down a bruised slice of fruit, a few strands of my own hair.
Maybe devotion is the only magic:
to keep touching what withers,
to keep coaxing green from what is already gone.
XVI / Kendra Brooks
In the silvery morning air,
In the foggy, melting mist,
The spreading light is carrying
off the dread of last night’s emptiness
Being without you through the night
is not worse than finding you
gone in the morning
in this place where beauty lives!
Transference / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
I have poet friends who bemoan that poems
don’t use metaphors anymore, that metaphors
are a dying breed. But really, sometimes
I just don’t want to satisfy the verb to be.
And anyway, what about all the other ways
words are little vehicles? Linguists will back me.
I remember reading George Lakoff’s seminal
book. How he explained the profound conveyances
prepositions make. The tenor of feeling
you can express by saying you’re up or down.
In English we’re spoiled with these little things
linking the unending boxcars sentences are.
Somewhere deep the brain still takes the dead
trails of metaphors, my old prof Haj, a friend
of Lakoff’s, used to claim. Haj died this past May.
I never knew why we called him Haj. His given
name was John. He, too, was a journey.
Recipe / Yvette Perry
Do you remember when you tossed me
the egg and I moved aside instead of trying to catch it,
and that was not what the other girls did, so as a result
you knew you wanted me to be forever yours? How
young you then were, and how utterly uncomplicated,
to make a major life-long decision based on splattered
yolk and albumen and shattered shell. How
foolish I’d be now to doubt the longevity of
such straightforward discernment. And how lucky we are
to hear echoes of our vows whenever we make a quiche.
Polygon of Light /Amber Wei
Wooded darkness, the light only reflects from
½ of the trees
Haunted hallowed truce
the panoramic expanse of geometry
forms a precipice
one step over I can breathe of another ledge
falling until legs meet another age of growth
Light protruding from the sentiments that birthed
a new aura of spoken geometrical aptitude
of angular hope
Fallen, I traverse the fields of diamond shards
and shelter pain from the grounded soil
fertile
of the memories only the light reflecting off the
dual sided branches
can penetrate the remaining
pieces of a melted patchwork heart
Deadvlei, Part 5 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 15
Blue Dressed Woman / Yael Aldana
There is a bar. We are there early
waiting
in semi-darkness, for a saccharine
band leader
so my son can set up and play
guitar, here, where
he’s too young to drink.
There is a woman, slight,
elf-sized, sloshing,
an overladen
mop. She too is waterlogged,
weighted down, bent over,
pressed down, the curve
of her back weighted,
pulled
downward
perhaps with life’s unkindness.
her dress swishes over her
calves, cobalt blue, polka dotted
with lively
cloud white flowers.
Fight back
I tell her.
a silent bubble in my
head,
Fight
back
When
she turns, I see a tiny
backpack looped over
her shoulders, jaunty
hope
promise.
Her mop chases our
feet. We raise them in
politeness. She goes
leaving the floor sodden
glistening moist.
Our eyes never
meet.
I’d rather be a poet saint and write devotional hymns all day / Catherine Bai
When Ammaiyar begged Shiva to release her
from her beauty, and all worldly burdens
I was exhausted by my surrender
to the man who hailed me on the street
and I was exhausted by my dominion
over the hairs on my bathroom floor.
Give me total power
or give me none at all.
I think you have confused me for a girl
when, actually, I’m the pupil in your eye
I do whatever the light tells me to
and you accept the world like a mold
accepts its plaster, forgetting that I’ve nearly
obliterated myself, just to flail around
in empty space. It’s exhausting to remember
that I’ll never ever be free, I can’t even
disappear, I can’t even fill up the earth,
when the distance to either pole
is the length of a cosmic universe.
Postcards Home / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
Dithyramb XV: for Jane Hirshfield / Kendra Brooks
To make sense of the world
First you must not get caught up in it
Avoid fads and trends and gossip
Instead find loose ends, grab on
And be willing to learn how things work
Together or apart
These connections help to make sense
Refuse to bend anything to your will
Resist taking anything for granted
Instead, notice how flowers grow
How a single seed holds a universe
Together and apart
See how the lopsided dandelion possesses
The soul and courage of a rosebush
Observe animals and their ways
How a horse lowers its long head
To water when it drinks
Rabbits are born blind
And survive on trust and community
Try to hold humans accountable
To the things that make sense
And question the incredulous acts
Together and apart
Follow any path that opens
Be ready to stumble and be afraid
Wisdom itself is still trying
To make sense of the world
I’m supposed to write a poem about the beautiful unicorn / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
of long-time female friendship, but I just had dinner
with two long-time friends, women I’ve shared
houses, adventures, books, and embarrassments with,
and something was different. We had sweet-potato soup
I double-checked didn’t have gluten, let them know
there were dairy pills for use. We sat too long
with numb butts at the dining table, scooted to the couch.
Our lives rhyme in similar arcs—parent retirement,
work trials, medical specialist referrals, strange pains
in the jaw, dreams about our teeth falling out. We used
to tell ghost stories over campfires, cry, goad each other’s
drunk texts, burn leftover wedding favors post-divorce.
What force is it that keeps us in orbit? I read somewhere \
if you’ve been friends for seven years you’ll be friends forever.
Nothing about this body feels forever, and the new fears—
so settled, sedate. After we ate and talked about our ailments,
they told me thanks for hosting, but it was late. I said
Thanks so much for coming all the way out here. It’s really far.
Drive safe. It’s dark out here in the country.
Diagramming Mrs. Dellmay / Yvette Perry
The message was already there when we arrived, en masse, from lunch.
Someone had written on the chalk board, calling her the b-word in large,
sloping, dusty block letters.
It had to have been someone from the Regular class, not the Honors class that now occupied half the 30 neatly rowed desks. We sat giddy with nervous anticipation, awaiting her arrival from the office where she was probably running mimeographs.
She entered,
greeted us, handed
a stack of purplish-inked sheets
to the first person, to be passed to the right and back.
We were slow to huff our daily lesson, all eyes on her.
Finally, she turned, approached the board. Adjusting her glasses, she regarded the words.
She picked up the chalk.
She drew a straight line
under her name (subject) and is (verb),
then separated the two words with a
short vertical line rising from the horizontal one.
She inserted a c between the th of the last word and added a period at the end of the declarative sentence.
Turning to face us,
she asked who could
come up to the board
to diagram a bitch.
Twice Removed from the Painting / Amber Wei
Bashful resonance replayed
unto the heart string’s nostalgia
no artwork can be the muse to which the
canvas is supplanted
the portrait is denied
For it was not enough
to get into the fair
with two coins
so I took my flower
hoping to charm the essence into giving
what would have been twice the
relationship renewed
And suddenly I felt life wasn’t enough to
have a night of aura
of hope lighting incense like a candle
and the blues subdued making its way
into a trickling soul, every verse where
it was leaving me
twice,
the pain
twice
the drama
Subdued there lay no arch in which the flag
could reach the moon
and my companion became
Mona Lisa
Für Elise
the gifted virtuosos
without a creator
and with all but the breath upon
which souls were defined
could recreate as the entity one could
embody as their own
Deadvlei, Part 4 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 14
Mi Gente / Yael Aldana
My soul sparkles like stars. I was a nowhere girl with no past. pero mi sangre trae las pistas de mis orígenes (but, in my blood are the clues of my origins). I am driven, like a donkey running with her ass at the whip to find them. La mayoría de mi gente está muerta, pero puedo descubrir sus huesos (most of my people are dead, but I can discover their bones).There is one that might still live. I want to find her before she passes from this world. If I am too late and she is lost to the ethers. I will be content to find those with her blood porque también es mi sangre (because it is also my blood).
I was too late. . .
Astoria is another word for paradise / Catherine Bai
apricot / fig pear / hibiscus / rose
sunflower / hydrangea Japanese maple
persimmon pomegranate / gingko
red and white string on a cherry blossom tree
racoons by the water / Canada geese
Oh, but how I miss the loquats outside their native soil
the baby alligators behind our snaking road
green apples shipped cross-country to the nearest grocery store
the beach is alright in Brooklyn, but oh
how the cool riptides pull me home—
Even If They Never Loved You / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
There
is a
line
drawn
from
earth to sky
of mothers
who loved you
before you were born
before your name
rose into the air
in baptismal
smoke.
You
Were
blessed by hands
you could not see.
You are gold
and blood
and salt
and
water.
You are
love and
love itself
before
its name
was
Love
XIV: Dithyramb for Kay Ryan / Kendra Brooks
Who would have your mind
if they could help it?
Not a dangerous kind
of a mind, hardly
but the kind of a mind
that gets run off
for imposing
its cunning charm?
An ethos untamed
in an unnatural frame
but not shunned.
Jokes unexplained
except by the sound.
Like erratic facts unpacked
and shrunk down
to slip through the cracks.
How on earth do you manage
wearing the brand
of the kind of a mind
not enough in demand?
XIV / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
At his interview, the great poet
said a sonnet can lose everything—
It can lose the rhyme, the timing.
It can even divorce the love note
theme. It can get rid of all these,
he mused, philosophically, except,
he claimed, for the number fourteen.
Instantly I felt a pang. Dejected,
I wished his pithy quote had turned
out of its insistent numerological
bent. That day I’d spent astronomical
energy wrestling fifteen lines to earn
the term. He had, this beloved master, smashed
my art, and made it move a little faster.
Bereavement Leave / Yvette Perry
For today this is all there is:
these hugs—deep breaths
inhaling Cinnabar,
hands rubbing and patting backs,
eyes closed against tears,
a whispered
I know I know baby I know
Tomorrow: stories
told and retold
so many times that punch lines
are recited in unison,
laughter so strong
that sides stitch
The day after,
Real Life
will demand adherence
to the Rituals
of the Mundane
But the black sheath dress
needing to go to the cleaners
remembers, releasing notes
of clove, jasmine, cinnamon,
and vanilla,
still warm from hands
and sounding like hymns
Ages to be Remembered / Amber Wei
Why were the listening years
substitutable
for the imagination of the
entrapped fidgets of the
collection of memories that
perplexed the handles upon which
stories become abridged
epochs
let there be a consciousness to
which a tale remains
the wandering child knowing no
remorse to the introspective
wonder that took
ages to be removed
withdrawn
was the story that
the admirers of passion
became entranced by
the desire to believe
and find me in the midst of the seaweeds from
the ocean depths looking
to find a fish make its way
through the maze of reality
shaped to gain traction of challenges
Desert Notes: Deadvlei, Part 3 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
Sept - Poem 13
Lupus lite #1 / Yael Aldana
I can see perfectly
Sometimes
Without glasses
Sometimes
I can’t see with glasses.
Can I see?
See?
Read?
Sometimes I can see
But I can’t understand
See but
can’t remember.
Glasses on
Glasses off
If I read, If I understand
If I remember
It’s a good day.
Nothing pains me more than to see your labor / Catherine Bai
It hurts to see you smile
when I open a book
it's not the ink that will kill you
but the language
You don't exist
and then it happens
I'm not your kin
and then it happens
You get a papercut trying to turn the pages
The poem you copied with your hand
was so beautiful on my wall, I asked
what the characters meant
I don't know, you said,
but here is a dot I made
and a line. Here is a curve with a hook at the end.
It's a perfect poem, isn't it?
I didn't have the heart to say
the poem had already vanished
It ended in the sweep of her arm
when the water was drying on the parchment
it ended when she laid the brush on the table
and I could no longer watch her body
mesmerize itself, the mother bird that regurgitates the worm
without thinking, the tree that doesn't plan its flower or fruit
it doesn't ask if it's time or if it's good
it simply blooms—
The Cat Promises Me Nothing / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
The cat promises me nothing.
she comes and goes, just like the first night
she appeared at the front gate, all ribs,
eyes and whiskers, four hungry kittens
in tow. Just like the morning she showed up
wet and shuddering in pain, pushing against
my palm in the half-light. She goes and comes
silently, threaded with flowers and dew.
The cat comes and goes
but her kittens remain, gray and calico, curled
in warm corners and purring on bookshelves.
The cat who has promised me nothing
grows bored of the rug in the corner
and of the couch. She sets herself up
on my desk, among the paintbrushes
and the post-it notes.
Sometimes I wonder if she knows
how I watch for her shadow in the evenings,
half-hoping, half-dreading her shadowed shape
at the edge of the lamplight. I leave the window
open, blurred edges of my heart trailing
rooftops and dark streets.
She brings the scent of wild places
moss, rainwater, the dust of pollen
as she brushes past, a reminder
that no home can hold everything,
that we all pass through warmth only
for one moment at a time.
When she comes and goes, I try not
to think of how soft she has become, and
how sharp the world outside will always be
no matter how hard I try to file its edges.
When she comes home, I remind myself
that the cat has promised me nothing.
She reminds me that nothing is ever promised,
not even when we cannot help but love.
Dithyramb 13: for Edna St. Vincent Millay / Kendra Brooks
Millay they say had quite the way with anyone she wanted
And if you got in her way she’d lock you away in a sonnet
What lips her lips have kissed and where and why is daunting
And in what arms she’s lain I cannot say, I only know
Her poetry is full of ghosts still tapping on the glass for a reply
What loves of hers have come and gone are the secrets of a lonely tree
And her voice remains a string of colored beads forever leading to the sea
Defying definition she is neither pale nor pink in her elegant design
Like pressed flowers in daintiness, her poetry, in ageless books resides
Read on –the shanty straining under the turning of the tide,
the strong wind and shattered spray of the big surf that breaks all day
Savage beauty could not suffer her to pass, not a timid poet was she
but a summer sang in her that sings no more, and if you dare to read
Her words will breathe your soul back into you, of that you can be sure.
Threshold / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Late &
my flash-
light’s
fading
orange.
I curse
Duracell.
Undercover,
I’m hot-
breath
reading.
Creak
on a step
is Mom at
door-crack.
We secret-
wait. Some-
times she
knows. Some-
times I
only think
she knows,
the shush
of slippers
downing.
I never
wondered
why she
was up,
why this
eye-door
dance. For
years,
we didn’t
give
it up.
Disorderly Conduct / Yvette Perry
Order in the court
The villains want to speak
No laughing
No smiling
No showing your teeth
Order in the court
The toddler wants to rule
No rhyme and
No reason
Just stupid and cruel
Order in the court
The rich man bends a knee
Corruption and
Kickbacks and
Singing off key
Order in the court
The leaders race to win
Grab power
Trade favors
Then do it again
Order in the court
The judges blow the case
Turn backwards
Speak sideways
Un-do and erase
Order in the court
The papers spew their lies
Even in
Daylight
Democracy dies
Order in the court
The preacher makes a stand
Damnation
And money
And shame hand in hand
Order in the court
The college closes doors
No dreamers
No strivers
No Fall campus tours
Order in the court
The business cuts the fat
For profit
Efficient
AI can do that
Order in the court
The streamer posts a pod
Subscribe now
For rage bait
Hit like and applaud
Order in the court
The shit has hit the fans
Tyranny
Police states
And empathy bans
Order in the court
The devil’s had his way
And this time
Like all times
The People will pay
Icarus – Dreaming of Another Day / Amber Wei
Great imagination is unadjusted
to the ruinous altitudes that plague man
for our hands hold no underlying basin
and the drops just fall
trickling into the depths
that dark chasms hide as we
trip amongst our feet
Hide from me what are the obstacles of my eye
so that my steps can be merry among dust that
hide the caverns that fallen are
the emotions that escape earthly reality
that consume what imagination
cannot give
Deadvlei Part 2 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 12
Covid / Yael Aldana
April Showers / Catherine Bai
What seems inevitable in winter becomes
impossible in spring, there’s no such
thing as watching a tree slowly
take bloom, it’s something you notice one day
when a child takes the red and white
bracelet in their hand and ties it to a high branch
They drop from their father’s shoulder to the ground
pointing upwards on their tiptoes
It’s not the wet, brittle blossom but his trembling chin
He cries, the sight of magnolia petals, bursting
brown at the edges, is happening
yet hasn’t arrived. My love, my love—
I’ll stand still and the world will turn on its axis.
You’ll find me in wintertime
where nothing grows wild and old.
Lunar Ramblings / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
You mustn’t trust anything, especially not the moon.
When you were twelve it came upon your window like a wordless god
promised you shiploads of stars on a constant sea.
It’s been years. Aren’t you tired now of swallowing storms?
There have been a thousand girls like you. They grow here, in the damp
where only the saddest things can bloom.
Each of them is beautiful, but not one of them can swim.
XII: Dithyramb for Herman Hesse / Kendra Brooks
These trees
with limbs that will never embrace
or run or jump or lose their grace.
These trees
have served long the summer shade
and winter stillness equally in equanimity.
Trees I call mine in spite of their freedom
and longevity. Trees I mark the seasons with
as they come and go.
These trees I call home.
Scarred and broken
Decorated in velvet leaves and tawny twigs
Bearing promising buds and hiding busy roots
These trees
I abandon in the rain and cold
These trees
whose scent I crave and know,
their silent songs play on deep beneath ground,
weighted like icebergs turned upside down.
These trees
color my world, shape my days
remind me to not forget the sky,
These trees
will live on after I die.
MASH / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
I Want to Tell You a Story / Yvette Perry
I want it to be full of hope, but not cliched.
I want a tight narrative…a compelling plot…
fascinating characters.
I want you to think you know how
the story’s gonna go,
and then I’ll throw in a surprise
he-realized-he-himself-was-a-ghost type twist
you never saw coming.
I want you to still be thinking
about the story decades after I tell you.
I want you to tell it to your children,
who will tell it to their own children.
This story will be an oral tale only.
I want the letters to burn through the page
if you ever try to write the story down on paper.
I want the keyboard to liquify and spill to the floor
if you ever try to type the story out.
I want this story to be for lips to say
and ears to hear only.
I want this story to transform you on a
molecular level. I want you to look in the mirror and
see someone unrecognizable from who you
were before you heard it.
I want you even to sometimes lose the
thread of your own name. It will be on the tip of your
tongue for a moment as you confuse yourself
for the story’s main character.
Am I ready to speak?
Are you ready to listen?
Journey / Amber Wei
You can let heaven glimmer
only when darkness subsides as deafness
draws closer into my soul
afraid I will hear its whisper
and that altitude gets higher
only to let oxygen and pressure
crush its depths
Get deeper into the ocean
but feel no mercy
for the waves to crash harder
and it be harder to escape
what wonders as lightness
only to be a sunken ship
Hope turns into gold
and it foils our imagination
until one day
we breathe air clouded by salt
and its pungent spice
is beautiful
romantic
because we feel that we never truly
tasted until we know what it was our
hearts were searching for
Desert Notes: Deadvlei (part 1) / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 11
In the first book / Yael Aldana
In the first book
There is the hour of the robin
Then the hour of the titmouse
Then the kookaburra whose name
I forgot, but the sound of which
I remembered
It is all very simple, she said.
Red is the color of life
of blood
and hurt
and judgement
and luck
don’t forget hurt.
She spoke so that the words
came out quickly, one behind
each other, although evenly
spaced apart
she scratched her head
nervously and twisted
a curl around her finger.
My whole body is slanted / Catherine Bai
1.
you have no idea
what shame is
how could I ever be shamed by
someone like you
who’s never even hugged their mom’s
magnificent pubes
2.
do you think I won’t do it
that I won’t seppuku right in front of you
the next time you even look at me through those
slits
3.
you likey
me likey
we all likey
I want so badly
for you to see me
4.
why even try
to be seen
The Same Dark / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
Weary of the same room
same yellowing light
same spoons clinking in teacups
same empty bowls waiting
to be filled, same need
simmering in the same
cracked saucepan, same
breadcrumbs, same trail
of sugar ants, same list
on the counter, same self
same mirror, same self
I start the day all over again
draw the same curtains,
slip again into the same dark.
XI: Dithyramb for T.S. Eliot / Kendra Brooks
What’s all the purring about?
Just this: every poet needs a cat!
Not a dog to walk or chase or pat,
A feline who knows all the feels
& keeps her criticisms well concealed;
A cat who with her purrs protects
And praises each new word the poet selects.
You can even teach a cat the sonnet form
She can easily tap out iambs with her feet
Stressed and unstressed for each single beat
and still keep her tail perpendicular.
When it comes to the practice of poetry
what’s better than a cat who knows a dactyl?
Survey / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Permission / Yvette Perry
I grant you access to the parts of me
that shrink from the light and are sensitive to
sudden changes in barometric pressure and altitude
Your ears may pop, too, if you crawl in this cabin with me
You may go down with me and the ship if you stay
I consent to your search
You may touch me through my clothes, under my clothes,
rummage through my bags, weigh and x-ray their contents
You may carefully check the ID I carry,
hold it up to my face,
make sure my eyes match the ones in the picture
I have nothing to hide
I have everything to hide
It doesn’t matter which
I agree to your interrogation
and I revoke my right to counsel
I am, for you, the open bar and the free buffet
Put that away
Your money is no good here, sir
I’m on the house
Everything, everything
My answer to everything is yes
Anachronism – Out of the Time / Amber Wei
When the aged architecture of the bone catches up to the naivete of the spoken soul
say to me what I forgot centuries ago
that birthed, the starlight vanished
and the fission of nuclear twilight was the anthem
and our memories transcended space and time
A short fusion into the remains of the Jurassic age
when the dinosaur roamed
let the remainders of the Jurassic age
not be the myth that forever adapted to the
imagination of man
For the shape-shifters were ever the
oceans that reconstructed according to the
continental drift
from Pangea
The everglades that found the sun at the equator was
the North Star of your eye
There, I emerged of the new age
the paradactyls were not prepared to hold
Desert Notes: The Tsondab / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 10
Marriage / Yael Aldana
There is a picture of us. In your parents’ front yard in St. Albans, Vermont, in bathing suits. Yours shorts, yours blue, mine black. You are sitting on a metal folding chair, feet in a blue kiddie pool, me sitting in the kiddie pool. I am getting fat. This is what I do in relationships. I thicken like albumin.
Explain this picture to me.
Why the fuck are we sitting
in your parents’ front yard
in a kiddie pool? Not even
a regular-sized pool
But one of those extra
small ones with orange
goldfish.
Your hand is on me protectively.
I look vaguely annoyed. Are
we happy?
Yes.
Relationship goals.
In Love / Catherine Bai
You touched my brain stem
the day you kissed me
when I watched Patty Chang making out
with her parents I thought it was
breathtaking. Ewwww,
you said, when you realized they were
eating an onion. It was raw
nerve that made me cut my neck
open to you. Why did you
sew me back in reverse
and suck up all my tears
when all I asked you to do
was share an onion with me.
Walking Home / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
After he drove off
the road unravelled
wet and empty before me
each house shut against slanting rain
Shoes bloomed with mud,
each footstep an ache for home
Notebooks bled through
backpack, through white shirt,
down the insides of wrists
into clenched palms
Still the road unspooled
step by step, its silence
urging me to keep walking
through the chill
still, not cold as the fear
of his return, that next time
he wouldn’t take no
for an answer.
X: Dithyramb for Sylvia Plath / Kendra Brooks
It’s hard to listen
when none of the voices
telling you
what to do is your own.
You hear yourself
being described
but not as the self you know.
You don’t recognize yourself
in the shadows that you cast.
–Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas
The creases of nuance and wrinkles of time
evade you in photos.
Under the generic shades of grey,
your hair dulls
to match the color of your eyes.
It’s like there’s distant music playing
but the words are muffled
and the song escapes you.
Or maybe you have escaped
–off to dance with Ella Mason
and her eleven cats:
finical, stentorian, wild-cats.
Coincidentally / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
In grad school I shared a house, and one
of my housemates was named Moken.
When he learned I spent winter break
in Thailand he asked if I had ever met
a people called the Moken. He’d learned
about them on Wikipedia, Googling.
“That’s a crazy question,” I said. It was
like asking, knowing I’d lived in Texas,
if I ever ran into Chuck Norris—which, no,
I didn’t, though I did pass near his ranch
in Navasota on the way to golf tournaments.
“There’s no way I should know this,” I said,
“but, yeah, in fact, we visited a friend
who does wellness checks on the Moken.”
I told him about mopedding the sandy edge
of a southern island. Across spanned
a rope-pulley drawn raft which took us
to a tiny village on the Andaman.
The Moken kids swarmed us, shook our
hands, toured us around their bamboo cabins.
They dive so often that they’ve learned
how to see underwater with precision.
I hadn’t known before that Christmas
of the Moken’s existence. I think of this
stranger I lived with, the coincidence
of a name, the arbitrariness of caring.
Misunderstanding / Yvette Perry
For the longest
I thought she said
I was the apple
in her eye.
How painful
that must have been
to have a whole
piece of fruit
blocking your vision
rubbing against
your inner eyelid
irritating your
cornea. So I stayed
as still as I could to
cause as little
discomfort as possible,
as small as I could
to alleviate agony.
Then later when
I learned it was of not in
I’d been too still and too small
for too long
to make the adjustment.
Origins / Amber Wei
Where was the time unsheltered
find home it yearned
and brightness became a
blaze of measure
daylight
Seeping water from the river
bringing gleam to the glen
And where was it
the dream
of a breath
where the sun always shone
and color curves like
the befriended light
Come closer, the whisper
became a voice
and the mountain heard and the
larks responded
For angelic song
was the muse that made
the birds sing
and the glen calls
for the day to be new
as the mountains part for
gushing waters to flow
The Two Ladies of Provence, Part 1 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
Still-dawn on Rue Frédéric Mistral. A black dog emerges from the near-light. Followed by nine
men playing flutes and tambourines. They walk past the bakery and the tiny corner café whose
name is a diminutive of the town’s – Le Petite Moustieraine. A disconsolate music is drawing
open the wooden shutters, the half-naked forms of disturbed sleepers peeking from behind blinds
and balconies and open windows.
At the very heart of the village, a cascade disgorges its water in a persistent ush and
rumble, blending with the notes from the réveil and lingering further than the ten shadows who
climb higher and higher into the skies, up the two-hundred and sixty-two steps where the chapel
of Notre-Dame de Beauvoir is perched between the open jaws of the canyon, the fourteen
stations of the cross succumbing to the grandeur of three giant cypresses, like portals to the in-
between. All these years they’ve been engaged in a contest with the steeple and the rockface
where the golden star hangs precariously against cloud and storm, chained to the cliffs by a faith
stronger than myth or martyrdom. Every night, a spotlight from the clock tower in the village
square washes its ten points so that even from afar, as you cast your gaze across the crested
valley, you’ll catch the faint twinkle of an omen.
Every day at the stroke of five, from late August until the eighth of September, feast of the
nativity of the Virgin, the dianaïres, or musicians, awake the disconsolate tourists, watched by a
rusty harvest moon, the same moon that would have cast its light on that early morning hunt
when the goddess, armed with bow, quiver, and an invincible beauty, would have vanquished the
starlight with her ravenous hound, teetering between this world and the sanctuary of the dead
Diana, moon-goddess, protectress of childbirth,
dressed in blue and a constellation of stars.
September - Poem 9
Almost Closed Curtains / Yael Aldana
after Didi Jackson
sometime after the last rain
after the red headed woodpecker
dips out of my sight, after he reappears
flashing here, then there. I imagine the foamy
thin now wet—now dry line at the beach
two miles away from the corner gas station
where I see the man who’s always there
with his fishing hat run through by two hooks.
He holds up his cardboard sign. scrawled
on one side: I need a blessing
scrawled on the other:
Why lie I need a beer.
when he needs a blessing
I hand him a grubby dollar
from the sanctity of my car’s window
nothing
when he needs a beer. Bless you, he says.
his hands reaching, his eyes unfocused
like he’s never seen me before.
he could be me.
a woodpecker maybe the same one, maybe
a different one, appears in my plumeria tree.
he doesn’t stay, not good for pecking. I make
it to my door before the steady drumming
of a summer shower. daily, the sky shadows
darkens with rain. I see a strip of gray-black sky
through my almost closed curtains.
where is the woodpecker?
where is the man?
are they dry?
Summer Fling / Catherine Bai
I don’t think I’ll ever write anything as beautiful
as a pear tree. Don’t blow kisses if you’re not
ready to make love. Better yet, don’t blow kisses
at all, just grab your lover and dig your fingers
into the pit of their shoulder blade. Knead
the knot that you find there. The inflammation
will go down if you put it on ice. We’re always
going around and around in our poems, but don’t worry—
it’s like a spiral. We may never be any closer
to the center, but we end up somewhere different
from where we started, the distance more like
the depth of a root system than a flight path
that loses its signal the moment we touch off.
Archipelago / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
home
is language
islands
of light
on humming
thread
spun from
fault and fire
steady
pulse
soil and
tide
everything
arrives
on the
sea
we’ve been
here before
drifting again
rooting again
IX: Dithyramb for Stevie Smith / Kendra Brooks
The Case for Drinking / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
It never ends, there’s always another chase—
hair of a dog, a shaded blade of turf.
I like to pretend that this is not the case.
Time moves slowly, slow as to obliterate
the newest sunrise, the juicer’s orange surf.
It never ends, there’s always another place
to make amends to, a slog of hour to waste.
Tell your sister to rest before she’s hurt
again. We’ll pretend a way for grace.
Don’t hesitate, strike up the band, embrace
the sway of fate. Admit, it can’t get any worse.
Bitter at the end, but always another chaser.
I trace the starlings like a broken necklace.
They dive all day, belie the sky’s inertia.
The judge pretends it isn’t about race.
Watch out for goons, masks that take the place
of faces. How much is news? How much rehearsed?
After its end, this country’s always chasing.
No one left pretends we have a case.
6:23 am September / Yvette Perry
Just a week or so ago by this time
birds would’ve already been busy
on their branches singing each other
where to get the tastiest grubs and bugs
and whether the Delmans had new
seed mix in their feeders
light would’ve already begun
tinting the edges of sky and
warmth would’ve already begun
hinting at 87, 88 degrees
Earth, Wind and Fire
must’ve been singing about
a different Septembernot this dark, silent, cold thing
Mangroves / Amber Wei
Ode to eclipse, another, un-splendid— / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 8
Still / Yael Aldana
The small brown bat is still caught the kitchen window
My mother sweeping him out the with her straw broom.
The black cat is still mewing on the forgotten porch
I am still sneaking him some milk.
I am still climbing on my grandmother’s bed
showing her my navy-blue school uniform.
Granny is still mixing me sugar water
Mum still yelling at both of us.
Mum’s hair is still mid back length
coiled in her corkscrew bun.
Mum’s still arguing with Miss Joan
the hairdresser to cut her mid-back hair.
I’m still in the garage still making a doll
swing out of a paper receipt and crimson thread
I’m still ruining my sister’s doll face with eyeliner
Granny is still making a straw from a pawpaw stalk
We are still blowing bubbles through it.
My mother still claps when she come upon us
Mum’s still telling me she did the same when
She was young.
I am still believing Mum was never little
I am still believing she was never like me.
Let the mummies rest / Catherine Bai
No one said you needed to make art
for consumption. Why take a photo of a mandala?
When you were born, you weren’t even allowed
to remember it.
Why did the ancient
Egyptians make the inside casings so
goddamn beautiful?
Well,
why not.
Why have one coffin when you could have
three? Why not put the loveliest one
at the center, and make the outermost layer
just lovely enough.
Time and space are overrated anyway.
Why not create something
devotional, for no one but the dead
to take home—
The Daughter is Nothing But Dust / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
This is how you lose yourself:
You are standing in the field
dressed in the same ragged hunger
your mother threatened to burn.
Never talk to strangers, she warned
but the taps have been dry for weeks now
and heat has loosened your prodigal’s tongue.
Her back is turned. She has been gathering bulbs
in the bright billow of her skirt since morning.
Even your mother, with her golden tegu’s eye
does not see him coming.
She doesn’t see your face when
he tears the fruit open with both hands,
holds it up to your lips like an offering.
In an instant, you are trapped
between the fire and the flood
then the ground swallows you
whole, seeds and all.
Oh mother, the truth is
I was curious about the inside
of the fruit.
It is so easy for you,
with your mouth full of flowers
but what was I to do with my thirst?
The land was so dry, and I have never been rain.
Now when we speak about water,
it is only a word. My name is that
which perpetually burns
a fissure in the earth
where all girls might fall.
I wish I had known then
what I know now:
There is no mercy among gods
for the thirsty.
The daughter
is nothing but dust.
VIII: Dithyramb for Dorianne Laux (cento) / Kendra Brooks
It took me years to grow a heart
Tonight I am in love with poetry
On the street outside the window
The moon is backing away from us
When the final piece is lifted and set into place
What if the ashes came down on us?
The pines rub their great noise
Such dumb luck. To stumble
It took me years to grow a heart
December 31, 1999 / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
There’s a gaggle in our living room. Light
buzzes in pixels from the square TV.
I am nine and have heard nothing about
an impending apocalypse as we watch,
gripped by the theatrical remake of one
from 1912. I think I’m on the floor, sculpt
of Persian carpet stamping my hands. Jack
and Rose slide from a broken stern into
the churn of ice-water. Sometimes a door
can serve a different purpose. Sometimes
a fiction of invented tragedy is worth
singing through. It was a legendary night.
Afterwards, we wrote our names in sparklers,
which, if you close your eyes right after,
can still imprint their trails behind your eyes.
This Poem Is ASMR / Yvette Perry
Existence / Amber Wei
What is art when I am
parched with paint
when turtles on the beachside of my creation
Come alive
And suddenly,
Art grows on me
To where it becomes not an entity at all
But a passion consumed by grief
Knowing that art is the yonder friend
Invisible
An invisible cloak
To where you are known by your paintings
And the artist doesn’t exist at all
I Asked Gemini about Skywriting – Conclusion / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 7
Running From Rain / Yael Aldana
for Sammi
An old fawn dog is snoozing, ear cocked
hears the silent clattering in her dream
her leg flails, hurried, rapid, rhythmic,
is she running to smack her lips on fallen
peanut butter? galloping after interlopers?
looping around the moss-laden
imitation Venus de Milo in the garden?
the leg pauses. does she smell
the pillow white clouds going
dark gray, the heaviness of moisture,
foreboding? She does not have to worry
about the late light bill, driving the car
without ac to save gas. the leg goes again.
perhaps she runs for cover, beats
the droplets, and retreats just
in time under the pine-beamed porch.
Well, you really did it this time / Catherine Bai
You said something so
sincere, you made the moon look
this goddamn jaded.
Beginner’s Guide to Parenting / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
First of all, admit that you know nothing.
The world is on fire. Your uterus is full
of microplastics. Chemicals build small
boats in your blood. Your heart is adrift
In a sea of unknowing.
They grow from one season to the next,
small hurts lodging here and there
like fishhooks, gathering questions
you will never hold the answers for.
But beloved, the orependola will not
build its nest in short format, nor
will the unkillable dasheen succumb to rot.
Children will grow whether you worry
or not, whether you know the answers or not.
Their need for you becomes tidal,
each day a new ebb and flow.
You will learn when to hold tight and when to let go.
VII: Dithyramb for Diane Seuss / Kendra Brooks
In revising the syntax of rumination,
she puts on the words, wears them
like a suit of colors mixing with sound.
Not just the sounds that ring in her & through her
but the scattering of the words as they speak
arranging and rearranging them like musical notes
to tell and re-tell; some singing, some whispering
or others shouting like how you imagine
the sound sensation of a sun rising in words.
A memory weaves itself like a heavy fabric
to be cut & sewn on a machine,
each warp thread passes through
the heddle of remembrance
and each strand is an utterance fitting tightly
into the waistband of the suit of lamentation;
the many colored threads form a celebration
of language loud enough even the dead might hear.
Commute / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Last night I showered early because a storm
might’ve come. It would have been hard,
slicked with lather, to light a candle.
Something about lights going out stings
and electric twinge, scent of a cave
in firelight, a snapping haze that’s almost
irresistible. The storm didn’t come to us.
It lashed the lives and roofs to the north,
downed other power lines. This morning
baptizes the drive to work. The wipers stick
when I flick them. Hardly anything steady
these days—only the barista who knows
my order. Funny, I never thought my face
memorable. On a podcast the host details
a murder last year in Colorado. I chose
the show—full of warnings and disclaimers,
a moral mask that amps anticipation. A poem
I read chastises for thinking fondly of a CEO’s
killer. Pencils that wag are disappointing.
Place the product, ink the 3D gun, bleach
the knives. Each of us shocks the silence quiet.
Until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky / Yvette Perry
Because I loved both science and music
I’d think for a long time about the line,
listening on black headphones
clunky on my head,
(hand-me-downs from my Daddy, likely),
about the impossibility
of it all, about how a rainbow
is sunlight refracted through
water falling down from the sky,
but “falling” and “down”
are not scientifically accurate,
as inaccurate as saying
“the sun rises” or “the sun sets”
because the sun is the sun
and we on earth
are the ones moving round
it, and this visible spectrum of colors
is what we call “rainbow,” but the spectrum
itself cannot heat anything, let alone
incinerate other solar systems’ suns.
The awe I felt thinking of this,
to be loved until such an
impossible thing.
To be loved like that.
*from “As” by Stevie Wonder
Oxidation / Amber Wei
Were you listening
when the bell rang
a bit too loud
When the rain rusted its edges
so that I could hear it
reverberate in tension
So not even air
can calm its motion
Is the bell afraid to be heard
For if it is, the wind is holding its breath
The rings can travel farther
to where rust cannot oxidize further
And the bell can tell that the battle has begun
And the warriors can all aggregate around the rust
So that boundaries become dissolved
And all that is left is the bell’s dust
I asked Gemini about Skywriting Part 6 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
ZAMMIT-DAY-7-I-asked-Gemini-about-Skywriting-Part-6.docx
September - Poem 6
Ginger Cat / Yael Aldana
ginger cat pads along my childhood
back wall smelling of spices and curry
from some unknown
kitchen.
I haven’t thought of you,
cat,
till I started writing about
my hair braided with navy ribbons
about my white ribbed knee socks
about my brown scuffed Mary Janes.
you return to me thirty years later
as an orange kitten
with circled fur
born in August
a Leo
who smells like underneath
the vending machine
where he was found.
I’m not a poet but / Catherine Bai
the moon does turn me into
a werewolf
and being in water does feel like being
a whale
and I read poems looking for turns
to steal
and I write horoscopes, because I love when words
make dreams come true.
And every so often I’ll think about the time
you picked me a flower from your own bouquet
and didn’t even
leave your number.
And the rose withered within days, but the red poem you made
seeped into my skin
like aconite.
Trying to Tame a Feral Cat at Midnight / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
I come to you as myself
pretending to be nothing but this animal
beneath the moon’s face
we are but wandering kin
I shed the skins I have worn
fold them and leave them at the door
it doesn’t matter anymore,
whether I have been good
I have walked this road
as many different creatures
I do not know what they say
when they speak my name
in their airtight rooms
with bars on the windows
nor do I care. I come to you
as animal, as bone and need
the night holds its breath
stilled by heavy nets of stars
you step closer, soundless
my ribs creak open
fragile cage of trust, both of us knowing
what it is to yearn alone
I am here in the dark
luminous and hungry as you
blinking slowly, hand outstretched
beneath the streetlight’s glow
rest here with me. I swear
to ask for nothing in return
VI: Dithyramb for May Sarton / Kendra Brooks
Day-6-Brooks-VI_-Dithyramb-for-May-Sarton.docx
When There Are Signs / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Browsing the poetry of Half Price Books
I find a former teacher’s collection.
Incredible, it’s full of love notes penned
in every margin. Slanted loops from
a precise and feeling hand. You’ll like this,
next to an underlined image. By another poem—
Remember when? Later—One day we can…
The book was signed at a reading. Could
I have been there, known the reader? Who
but a fellow student would be so clued in,
so absolutely thorough. And who is this to?
An ex-lover at this point, offloading unread,
uncared-for gifts. Have I ever read one book
gifted to me? Even that one in which my friend
wrote out a Shakespeare sonnet? And what
about the time I gave a volume to a boyfriend,
inscribed, In this is the heart of a woman.
These abandoned letters embarrass me
with their intimacy, urgency, their not being
for me and my not being able to unsee.
The swirls bend, blend so much that in the end
I can’t tell if the last written words are
I’ve had a lovely or I’ve had a lonely time.
Holes / Yvette Perry
I’m thinking of all the things that have holes.
Donuts. Car tires. Slices of Swiss cheese.
Sponges. Honeycombs that are home to bees.
Round wafers of metal that twirl onto
screws to stop them from vibrating. Also:
bagels and Bundt cakes and pineapple rings.
(So many foodstuffs are hole-having things.)
Buttons and small eyes of sewing needles
like you used to use to turn cloth to clothes.
45 spinning on the turntable,
playing Kool and the Gang that we’d dance to.
A hole in my heart as I’m missing you.
A hole in my heart as I’m missing you.
A hole in my heart as I’m missing you.
Pixie Dust / Amber Wei
Why does the rotary accelerator
require movement
defined by a cyclical axis
requiring mechanical synchroneity
to enable growth
for turning is not a vision
of the simple machine
executing
progress
and rather it is imagination
that the unknown can be happening
as you look at the immediate
and things happen
because of belief
so magic finds movement
and movement finds measure
to understand that all gasp is protected
by creative audacity
knowing that mind limits the ability of the world to know
that the rotary turns
for a reason
I Asked Gemini About Skywriting Part 5 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 5
The Ripple of Cats / Yael Aldana
after Margaret Atwood
There is a ripple,
a movement,
unseen cats? Leaves?
It’s as if
the leaves are moving
moving
by themselves.
There is also a smell
pungent,
also rancid
a smell of things,
old
dense, heavy,
a smell of
the forgotten.
It’s impossible to live / Catherine Bai
That’s it.
It’s impossible to live.
We might as well do other impossible things
like make the clichés new again and fall in love.
Not with each other, I mean
but with the whole, stupid world.
Lucid Dreaming / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
The moon is a single brushstroke
of titanium, a flick of God’s wrist.
The dog howls herself into thinning silver,
neck stretching toward the sky like
an unravelling thread of light.
Because I cannot howl, I am trapped
between the rooftop and the lower
atmosphere, fingers stretching
toward long lost sisters in the stars.
V: Dithyramb for Adrienne Rich / Kendra Brooks
in another change of world:
We the people, those of us suffering
the slings and arrows of outrageous
misfortune; we poor and huddled masses
enduring the injustices of fate and inflation,
thrust upon us like unwelcome greatness.
The damage is done, what treasures will prevail?
Persisting in this era of high speed tech
we no longer use an atlas for a difficult world.
The voice we heed is still that of a woman
(generated by AI). She tells us where to go
and how to get there as well as how long
it might take, and if we stray or change course
on the fly, she commands us to “return to the route”
Good thing some few of us can still find our own way
through Corralitos under rolls of cloud.
Poetry as Hazard / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Prof told us to have a handout and a metaphor for a poem.
I forgot we were presenting, but on cue took up the chalk
and drew wobbled loops on the deep green board. This is golf,
I said. There are 18 end-stopped lines that wind, a meter of pars,
rhymes of 4s, 3s, and 5s. Even, I beamed, a mid-course turn.
You should really learn the etiquette, but no need to be good.
So many ways to get into the woods, gritty sand, loss in a lake.
Make no mistake, I said, everything’s a choice—voices let in the head,
aim, an endless maze of counting, strokes of luck and duffs. Isn’t life?
I got an 80. Not bad for golf, but sort of sad in a class of poetry.
Criminal Order / Yvette Perry
I’m waiting out the final days
of our species bingeing procedural crime dramas
on premium cable channels.
I’m comforted by their theme songs,
opening credits list of actors,
cheesy dialog, and the way the team
knits together all the clues by the final act.
I’m soothed by the eight-by-ten photos of
raped women, missing children, mutilated bodies, and
arson- or terrorbomb-destroyed buildings
that the team pins to bulletin boards.
I eat my organic snacks and yell
warnings to the lady about to go investigate
the sound coming from her basement.
I verbally chastise the little boy on the playground
agreeing to help the man from the white panel van
find his lost puppy.
I joke/worry about the ads airing between
show segments for dozens of
different drugs with too-many-vowel names. If
I’m being accurately targeted, I am
depressed and overweight
with arrested bowels,
suffering from some species of mites
nesting in my eyelids
that I didn’t know existed.
Sometimes,
if I watch too many episodes too close to bedtime
I’m visited overnight by unsettling dreams where
I’m relentlessly pursued by
human-sized Demodex folliculorum
wielding axes in their eight pincers
and reeking of laundry scent booster.
In the morning after these nights,
my brain is fogged
and my reactions slowed.
I self-medicate with strong coffee and
worry what this diet
of mayhem and cruelty
is doing to me.
I wonder:
Is my viewing of these
shows a symptom
or side effect?
I wonder:
Am I escaping from
the age of the end of humanity,
or helping to usher it in?
Layers of Reality / Amber Wei
Is the Mariana Trench deeper
than your dream
for if it is the irreconcilable bout that
beats waves only to be met by the
calamity of the sea,
be frugal in the way you replace
the windowless plane with
a feat of engineering
Let turbulence be a refuge before
which you know not which eyes will
open from the sleep,
dreaming that someday the morrow will
bring a lifetime of irrevocable
hope
So let those days drown which cannot sustain
to the next day’s venture –
the floating plane
Gravity sunken by the
breath that immovable becomes the
airway’s trauma
Spindles form from the comet’s dream
of space,
cloistered by trajectory
Let the plane fly higher than innovation
so flight itself is smothered by depth
and the Mariana Trench breathes of
deep hydrothermal vents
Only to know that magma
drips from its depths
I Asked Gemini About Skywriting- Part 4 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 4
More / Yael Aldana
ingest in
my lifetime, this lifetime, more than could
fill a lake, more than endless sprouting
and shedding of leaves. more than can be
imagined, more than I can imagine. you
cannot imagine much. you tell me to contract,
remain compact, contained. what is on
the other side of more? you think it might
destroy us, might take the breath from our
bodies. you want me on this side with you.
I am afraid. more than you know, but I want
more. more than I could imagine. more than
I could bathe in, more than I could taste, touch,
hold. my mother taught me to expand, to expect
everything, to take everything in. I used to sanctify,
safety, and sameness. til I broke open, felt death
in mediocrity and ritual, as much as I love
the curve of your back, the dip of your cheek.
I cannot stay, as much as I love the crease in
your neck, as much as I love the coil of your thigh,
as much as I love the rough skin of your palm.
I write poems the way you read them / Catherine Bai
It’s a privilege to think about breaking up with you.
Not that there were red flags, just
no flags at all. If we’re all gonna be dead soon,
why cry about endings?
There’s still time for a million movie scenes.
They don’t have to be in order, just think back
to the past five days—
Did you always eat breakfast before dinner?
I did, but that’s not the point.
So then what’s the point?
Really,
it’s just that we’re still here
and maybe we’ll always be, unless
we’re actually, really
still there—
Apparition / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
There is a woman’s face in that tr ee
gathering moss along the jawline,
paper nest of wasps in her hair.
From the half-open back door,
everything is more magical than me.
Ti Mari folds itself in two,
trembling with sunlight. never once
considering what it might mean
to be shut.
Someone once asked, “Will you still write
after the baby is born?” I think about this often,
about the doorway, its rusted hinges,
the one broken latch that rattles,
wrenched daily by small, insistent hands.
I have been doorway, latch and hinge
all the things that exist for no purpose
but to open for others.
It’s always the smallest things
that take up the most space,
seed under leaf, hiding its medicine,
bachac treading back and forth
in overgrown grass until
eventually the path appears.
I carry it all with me, the right words clenched
between jaws like bitten leaves, wearing
beaten paths from room to room.
We make space for what we must become
in tightly woven nests of spit and paper,
in termite mounds, secret underground chambers
where we can grow into ourselves unseen.
The woman in the tree appears
to no one but me. Her body rises from the earth
in broad plank roots, winding in ridges beneath
cracked concrete. Her arms keep the earth together.
IV: Dithyramb for Lucille Clifton / Kendra Brooks
Who among us can
imagine ourselves
unimagined? Who
if this was her
only poem
would be enough.
Try for just one lost
moment to imagine
the monster
you might let yourself
become.
Generations / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
I’m always picturing missionary kids on starships.
They hurtle through the outer distance, a vessel
of generations, a nebulous line of interference.
Imagine the initial separation—years between
grandparent visits, belated birthday cards, Poptarts
and marshmallows mailed at great expense. But then, the expanse,
so many adopted uncles and aunts—the coworkers
of parents co-opted into family. We were few,
but somehow many in this tenuous drift. I think it was a gift.
How-to Raku / Yvette Perry
An erupting volcano, inside
glowing center-of-the-sun-like
bright yellow-orange
flames leap out the top
gas feeds fire and whispers
to the vessel within, heat
prompts painted-on skin to melt
and flow, coaxes paint’s metals to
dance a dance of ancient alchemy
lines on the digital display
shift and rearrange:
936…1005…over 1800…time
for the volcano to give birth.
Pilot long metal tongs into
the volcano’s mouth, deliver the
vessel from the volcano’s belly
into the metal trash can
it goes, onto a bed
of newspaper strips, immediately
setting strips to flame.
Quick! Quick! Cover the can with its lid!
Starve the vessel of air, smell the
acrid bouquet of burning carbon.
Lift the lid.
Cradle the vessel with hands clad
in thick insulated gloves.
Set gently on the pavement
allow to cool.
Feast on the galaxy of iridescent red
and black and gold and blue—
And that is how you do raku.
Myth of Er / Amber Wei
If you were Er
why did the distance become too
large for you to make a choice
based on physiological perception
Perhaps my hands were too dry
for yours to be holden with empathy
Let the fishing line that connects my soul
with yours
be based on a heliocentric
model of the universe
For if not, you would choose wrong
the fates unassuming your destiny
passion precludes fear
so do not be afraid of the
unknown when your soul
wasn’t enough
but fulfilled
So live each day as the
cup of water that
half-filled is the virtue that you
seek but never becomes
enough for you to know that
to know joy is to live well
I asked Gemini about Skywriting – Cont. / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 3
Kitchen Towel dress / Yael Aldana
I bought a dress that looks like
my mother’s kitchen towel.
On sale for $12.99 at Macy’s
with twirled pasta, fake red tomatoes,
a green flower burst of basil.
reminds me of her pasta salad with dill
torn from page 38 of Good Housekeeping.
reminds me her of 7-UP sponge cake
recipe milk splashed and copied
from her best friend.
reminds me of her Palella from page 24 of
The Rita Springer Cookbook.
reminds me of her black fruit cake
that shouldn’t go with cheese, but does.
reminds me of her black pudding
which I refused to eat.
reminds me of her mac and cheese
where Velveeta is the secret ingredient.
reminds me of making ice cream in
an ancient machine in the garage.
my mother would say it’s nay nay dress
that it looks like it was $12.99
that it should have stayed at Macy’s.
|reminds me of the cream colored
kitchen towel slung over her shoulder
her back to me, humming a song I
never learned.
I write poems the way you read them / Catherine Bai
No one told me it would be so easy
letting someone push me out of the street.
I didn’t even see the collision, I didn’t even
know it happened.
Their existence, I mean.
My eyes were closed when you showed me the wound
they were closed when you blew me a kiss
the kiss landed on my wrist like a slap, the skin
was a color I hadn’t seen before.
I looked beneath my fingernails and found it there
it was there all along, I never knew
you could live your whole life
without touching every bit of flesh
that was made from theirs.
Guava / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
For Kevin
seventeen was a bush fire
and you turned up like rain
I’d grown accustomed to being left
in unlit rooms, to not being asked
what do you want
what keeps you awake
what do you fear
what do you yearn for
in one of our letters, I asked for guava
to call my spirit back home
after seventeen years of wandering
after fleeing through floorboards
in the spaces between my parents
after clawing my way through
my grandmother’s mirror
to name the awful fear
of recognizing my own face
you squeezed guava pulp
with your hands, brought me
nectar in a blue bottle
still frozen in your backpack
despite the midday heat
all these years later, our house
is still filled with its fragrance
beloved, know I am still returning
through half-shut windows, through fear
through floorboards and
even now, in this guava season
you still call me back to myself
III: Dithyramb for Mary Oliver / Kendra Brooks
There’s a an otter in every poem:
brave at birth, boldness grows
in a sleek surrender to the cold,
a graceful strength beneath the water,
prowling with tiny paws
sniffing with a smaller nose
exploring life from well below,
waterproof fur that insulates,
and a sleek tail
to steer smoothly upstream.
Oh Fanny! / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Oh Fanny of Mansfield Park,
how I used to overlook you,
wish you’d stretch into some
other fetching Austen heroine,
the ones with wit and shining
eyes. But you of all of them
were fully realized, secret love
so deep no flattering Henry could
entreat you. This time, re-reading,
you enchant me—your needle
eye into false pride, the play-act
of sincerity. Who, dipped in your
clarity, could want to Marry Mary?
You the hinge of a brilliantly
laid irony, the key to that locked
gate, the unmade performance
we’re ever practicing and failing,
flailing always into the wrong arms.
Revival / Yvette Perry
The Poet asks me:
What will you do
when the drums begin to beat?
I know how I should answer.
I know I should say that I’ll be moved to dance,
to sing, to tap my feat in time.
I know my heartbeat should synch
with that of the drummers…
that my pulse should find
the pulse of ancestors
who once felt this same rhythm.
The Poet asks me:
What plantation
do you need to get up and walk away from?
I know she means a metaphor.
I know I should scribe a line from plantation living to
any living that is not fully free.
I know I should say I’ll leave thoughts
and rituals that no longer serve,
peel away versions of old-me so
new-me can be revealed.
The Poet asks me:
Are you breathing?
I realize at that moment
that I had not been.
(Response to prompts from Salaam Green, The Good Listening Project Community of Practice, 9/2/2025)
Technē / Amber Wei
The riviera was as glacial as the time
time froze itself
for all we saw to be the sunken village
mythical in its ability to float
above our baseline of perception
feeling that there is a pulse only
when intentional learning of
involuntary movement,
valves,
makes itself real
So the coastal riviera is a learned belief
for what is lost amongst the times
I floated above the plane of the
three-dimensional axis
to be able to relish the grapes of the vineyard
for the Mediterranean salt to tell me
it was not the location that embodied me
Rather, I fell into its arms
and time became frozen
because what was real
was the photograph that was taken
when the riviera became the myth
only my own years can tell
I asked Gemini about Skywriting – Cont. / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 2
Coffee / Yael Aldana
Should I have coffee now?
I can’t sleep,
4:43 a.m.
Computer’s blue glow
should I have coffee now?
I put on Rupaul’s All Stars.
should I have coffee now?
my bearded son will wake up in 4 hours.
should I have coffee now?
My relative with dementia
is probably already awake.
I’ll take him to his ultrasound
appointment later.
Morning brings his body’s
remembered practice
too hot tea,
insipid morning shows
It’s the here and now
that’s a problem
slips out of his hand
disappears before it hits
the floor.
He resets, starts again.
and again, and again.
The stray cats in the spare
room are probably awake.
should I have coffee now?
I get up. He’s sitting on
the leather couch
behind too hot tea.
The cats are barking, he says
I’ll get them, I say
I’ll have my coffee now.
I never said I was good / Catherine Bai
Every version of me that has died is a child
my parents loved more than I did.
I threw up in their mouths and they swallowed
I threw darts at their legs and they caught them with their chest
I curled my fingers into a fist and they simply held it, a stone
they cast into the river knowing every current will sink.
Still, they dive headlong—
through their bubbles they tell me to stay on the banks.
They’ll go first, the river says.
They’ll go first.
Tearing Down the Monument / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
If you ask the island,
it will tell you its name
in a thousand different ways
until you no longer need to hear it
because it has already taken root in you
like red mangrove, like vetivier
like your own bones. The island
has named itself over and over again
ever since the beginning, when
limestone first leaned toward the sea
The island still names itself
anew each morning, just like
when the ships came, in tongues
that man could never truly understand.
You cannot discover what you have hurt,
what you have stolen, what you have
never really seen to begin with.
For the swamp sees itself in the heron,
and the oilbird in the mountain’s face.
You do not need to name something
to see it, to walk through it without
leaving loss and rot in your footsteps.
The island belongs to itself.
If you ask, it will tell you that they
only named the shape of a thing
they wanted to believe.
While we learn to see again,
tearing down that which erases us,
the land breathes its own true name
in the chest of each screaming bird
and the language of each crashing wave.
II: Dithyramb for Billy Collins / Kendra Brooks
(in response to his poem Marijuana)
I too swallowed the moon!
Gazing up one lonely night,
I opened wide and took it in,
like a lozenge meant to soothe
the dryness in my throat.
In amazement & comfort
I soon lost track of it on my tongue
And the moon slid right down.
Half choke/half panic
I caught my breath mid-slide
as its roundness almost blocked
my trachea like a lid.
In knowing it was too late
I convinced myself, and those
maybe watching, it was wholly
what I meant to do -swallow the moon!
Thank goodness for the reflux
of a poem fully chewed.
The Joy of Painting / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
I come home to my husband streaming
Bob Ross’ old show. It’s the beginning
of the episode. Bob lifts a giant brush
and swabs the background into painted woods.
Then he steps through. We watch him shape
a seascape. The hues of greens and blues
curdle fantastically into waves. He squiggles
foam into existence. Isn’t it simple? I say,
Couldn’t we do it? Somehow the scene falls
together. Did you know Bob Ross was
a drill sergeant? Khiem asks me. Imagine.
No mistakes, says Bob, his reddish afro blurring
in unremastered history. And the rest of the line—
only happy accidents. Bob tells us to be brave,
drags two black trails down our perfect storm
for palm trees. He’s right. Something was missing.
We didn’t know. How could we know until it was there.
Prism / Yvette Perry
I try my best to be a pane of glass,
transparent, clean of streaks, dust, and smudges.
I try to just be something you look through
to see sky and trees outside your walls, see
people you know—alive, dead, remembered—
make their way to your front door, ring your bell.
I try to keep myself out of your tale.
I tell myself I have two ears and two
eyes but only one mouth for good reason.
I am what you look through to understand,
to think then say aloud that which makes you
confused, or ashamed, or full of fear. But
I can’t be see-through. I’m here, you see. I
absorb your dark, then create a rainbow.
The Evergreen Changes / Amber Wei
Love is not mine
to be bemused
radicals drop
and circadian silence becomes
the reservoir for those atomic nuclei
to be withholden
from nuclear fusion
Forget this silence who I am
to become the boreal forest
who the winter was
because evergreen remained
when snow crept and exited
And titanium is
not unbreakable
but in another universe,
it was isolated
So find me
past the influence of the changing seasons
away from the silence
railway hammers find as
the void
Build towards the directory of habits
so that my voice finds the utopian grove
too heavy and the bird songs
say that patterns are chatter,
blending towards a void too heavy
Beauty becomes magnified
and burdened beyond will
so titanium rust becomes profitable
as all likelihood is lost in the void
Love, what was, is what
the boreal forest becomes
driven from the winter’s change to what
the summer said
every breath it breathed was
I asked Gemini about Skywriting:1 / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
September - Poem 1
We Went Back / Yael Aldana
she went back there to the side garden
with the too-short coconut trees that wouldn’t grow
She found my gold bracelet, lost for forty years.
she sips her tea from the cup with
the pink roses, places
it in the matching saucer
I bring her a croton leaf. I found
it, present it in all its glossy yellow
gold waxy iridescence
my stomach sticks out too much with
too much roundness still acceptable for
a child, the rest of me matchstick
skinny.
It’s still years before people start
commenting on that too thick belly
those too skinny legs.
section off my body parts.
dissect me petal by petal.
Granny reaches for the orange brown
Leaf, coos her approval
she still in her pink pastel housecoat
that only I liked.
after Granny died, we all returned
to this morning. after
Mum died, we all stayed
there
together.
The City / Catherine Bai
Charles Simic wrote, “I tell you, I was afraid.”
I wrote it, too, every day
a flock of birds slipped across the sky and the pale blue light
continued to vanish as if nothing had happened.
Did I ever tell you about the time a friend picked me up from the airport?
Not my friend but someone’s.
In my teeth were nibs of wild raspberries I picked along the trails of Michigan.
He gave me a bottle of water, the friend
I was afraid I’d never see him again
Don’t go, I said, don’t go, as his fingers touched mine without a glance.
Summoning / Danielle Boodoo Fortune
I: Dithyramb for Linda Pastan / Kendra Brooks
When I think of Linda Pastan as I do
often after reading one of her poems
or when I’m not thinking about anything
in particular a line of hers will come to me.
Hers is a familiar and comforting voice,
one of the things I did not know I loved.
Hers is a music of departure which brings me
to the poets who came before, not the old
white men who take up most of the shelf
space in the library, but the lesser female poets,
the ones who pried open the windows
they wanted to jump from. The cigarette
smoking lady poets, smoking to stay
steady on their feet, pretending not to care
too much, unknown poets petrified with fear,
weighed down in their disgrace of attempting not
to leap and soar, typing hard on keys that stuck,
bleeding hope into their ink wells, penning
their souls like addresses on letters never sent.
Toiling daily in their craft, as if their inner lives
both depended upon and were afflicted by
poetry. Staying up all hours jotting down
the shapes of open wounds then laying bare
the scars that form from hiding them.
Girl poets –writing out of necessity and unaware
that poetry might be a panacea, a home remedy,
best served with a woman’s touch.
Part tribute, part celebration dithyrambic poetry is an imitation aimed to inspire and inform poetic experience. Dithyrambs were an ancient Greek form of poetry dedicated to the worship of Dionysis the Greek god associated with fruitfulness, theater, and ritual madness. My goal is to celebrate 30 poets who have inspired me on my poetic journey. Ritual madness here goes:
I’m so deep into Thai soap operas that I understand their references to other soap operas / Kimberly Gibson-Tran
and this is a sort of victory. I devour hours
of the actors, their porcelain skins reincarnating
across genres and temporal dimensions. On Instagram
I track both halves of the world’s most beautiful couple.
They exchange rings, replay their on-screen fling
as princess and princess’ bodyguard. Millions of followers.
I have learned ancient pronouns, about monarchy, religion,
astral planes, demons that lick you with whips to hell
and back again. I always up my Channel 3+ subscription.
Just $12.99 for six months of access, a portal to the fantasies
of the country I used to live in as a kid. I am wickedly
in love with senseless romantic plots, bitchy subterfuge,
even the funky audio boings and laugh cues, three back-to-
back instant replays of an accidental brush of lips. This
my Roman Empire, this my addict fix. This is how I exist,
pupils glued to the black tube in my grip as I slide
into unreality, delicious tragedy promised in dropped petals
of frangipani.
Dot / Yvette Perry
A little dot
between my middle and ring fingers
on my left hand.
First black,
then dark gray,
then light,
then recently—
sometime in the last several years—
gone. I hadn’t even noticed when
it disappeared.
Standing in line, obedient.
I wait for the teacher
to lead our class to the
Library.
I don’t hear what the
Boy says.
He’s looking as me.
His friends look at me.
They laugh.
I ignore them, my
mind alight with visions of all the books
I will check out.
The Boy points at me
with his pencil.
I shield my chest
with my folder
like battle armor.
The Boy pokes my armor
with his pencil.
He pokes, and he pokes, and he pokes.
His pencil, tip freshly cranked
with the tumbler of sharp steel blades
nailed to the classroom wall, pierces
my left hand between
my middle and ring fingers.
I’m sent to the nurse.
I miss our library period.
The nurse pulls the
pencil lead tip from between my fingers
with tweezers, then cleans the
wound with some liquid that
stinks and stings.
I tell her what happened.
She tells me, “Oh, that’s just how
Boys tell you they like you.”
I have the scar, a dot, like the name
(“Spot”) the Boy and his friends sometimes
called me, for decades.
First the dot was black
(sometimes the Boy would say “Black Spot”),
then dark gray, then light. Then gone.
I used to look at the dot
and imagine lead slowly releasing
deadly poison into my bloodstream.
I look at the space where the dot used to be
and wonder if the poison has been
completely absorbed.
Allegory of the Cave / Amber Wei
The voyage, itself, is the unmatched treasure
burdened by the voyager borne
upon times salt burned,
tasteless was the freedom
an unfazed muse
Abruptly standing at the helm
he put the compass in my hand, clutched
my fingers so that time was an intractable volume
surrounded by man’s integrity
Do not be lost though the wayward journey
is unbecoming of the lark you are
that sings in the cave of silence
the shadows you see are projections of
youth that lost you
Find winter, only to let the shortened days be
a cycle of dark mornings that find evenings
let darkness consume so
you no longer see silhouettes
In total coverings the world is more simple
because shadows are not real when
there is blinding light
or when the darkness of the night descends
so that no light can trick you into seeing entities
that require a pursuit of truth
to believe as real
Desert Notes / Abigail Ardelle Zammit
1: I asked Gemini about Sky
It is a truth unacknowledged but irrefutable that every desert is in search of its sky. After twilight, once the temperature drops, or the cacti resign themselves to another blackout of punishing heat, the skies flee in search of an elsewhere, leaving stars all a-quiver, Andromeda’s ebullience outshining the Milky Way, and the Milky way lost, jaw-logged, pretending it holds the same night-sky.
Every night, the palette is gigantic, a coalescence of indigo and lapis blending into darkness always and already unrecognizable. Was there yesterday, or the day before, or a year from now any real chance of verisimilitude?
Perhaps you’ll shake your head, looking up, lacing your eye to a sky that blooms with the same (you assume) unmistakable candour. But sky isn’t one. And never is it the same. Which is why the desert it looks on, is never the same desert.
Of the flightiness of stars, you’ve already heard. Bring back to life the pyramid builders, the giants that heaved dolmen and menhir on shoulders that almost touched the heavens. They’ll most certainly lose their bearings. In vain they forage for the treacherous Pleiades, their long-dead flares travelling surely but imperceptibly against ancient firmaments—
From ‘firmus’, meaning ‘strong’, ‘steadfast’, ‘enduring’.
Imagine, then, if they were to discover that firmus is plural, restless, ephemeral, always and already moving. Perhaps then they’d start to understand what it’s like to be a desert.
Or a dune, morphing with the wind.
Not the eye, but the memory of sight.
Desert as yearning. As desire. As inexorable want.
And its skies, always and already
lost——