October - Poem 8

Phantom Lover  / Lilly Frank

I am in the palm of your hand; spoon fed the promise of a different
tomorrow. The way the sentences had parted from your lips,
bewitching, enticing, and oh so disingenuous. And somehow, it fooled
me every time. This cycle gripped me by the throat. Paralyzed and
ardently in love, I stayed for the promise. I stayed in the desperate
hope to one day, embrace the man you could never become. In
retrospect, there was no heartbreak. Devastation, passion, sure.
Whatever you want to call it. But the man I had loved was not the one
in front of me, he was never in front of me. Phantom lover, I beckon, I
plead, I grovel. Palms and kneecaps soiled with the soot beneath the
plush of the carpet.

Theory  ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

From your bedroom
the entire world         is darkness 
 and you can be alone. 
We are     each alone
without the need to commune. 
Some day well    become        the flicker from our screen
a thousand light years from
 the next closest sign of a human being.
We won’t go outside to follow 
a flock when we can join a swarm 
of hash tags,     as they transform
into a unit    an illumination of our culture.
Did Homo Erectus see their own end? 
The evolution of their mind 
brought all life on earth on a ride
launching us forward as a species 
like a snap of hot oil from a pan.

intervals / Kathryn Johnson

We are timeless.
I don't mean eternal. Instead,
I see that we live our lives avoiding time.
We are willing tourists to the past,
painters and architects of the future,
and too often we turn from and
ignore our present.

Today is a rainy fall day,
with a low, heavy sky and
I am tempted
to imagine
that tomorrow may be
crisp, blue, and adorned
with little clouds.

Or rush forward
to the snow I hope will fall
in the last days of the year.
I could keep going–

racing into the spring and reliving
the humid, bright afternoons of an Ohio summer.
Only to find myself right back
in the middle of
a wet and cold October afternoon,
wrapped in a cardigan and unsure

where the time has gone,
how a year has passed.

What if I did different today?
I could stitch time
into the sleeves of my sweater,
an appliqué of minutes and hours. Instead
of living a timeless life, I could choose
to be time-full.

I could approach time
like a blushing bride,
not to keep it bound,
hand-fasted to me
but to be a helpmeet
and to make a life together.

How on Mother’s Day and After / Kimberly McElhatten

How on Mother’s Day, I dig three holes to plant three trees, and how the sun beats on my bare shoulders when I hear—chweep, chweep, chweep—the alert call of two eastern towhees and how I’m the danger and find their nest next to where I dig, and in it, four white eggs speckled brown and yet, I keep digging at the dirt and sandstone for three more hours because it’s Mother’s Day and I’m alone and have the time and how, though, I can hardly sleep that night, worried my tenacity may have killed those four babies left all those hours without a warm-bellied blanket while I dug in the dirt and planted trees.

How I check on the nest every day until they hatch into a miracle of naked bodies and big gray eyes and how for eight more mornings, I follow their progress, and on day six, I notice the nest sag between the branches under their growing weight, and how when I touch my hands to the bottom and shift it for a stronger purchase, they huddle close.

How too soon they’re downy and slim feathered flightless fledglings with mom and dad chweeping after their shy bodies tumbling across the grass, into the ferns, and through the woodland asters, and how I’ll hear chweep, chweep, chweep for days until shy becomes assured, and how too soon four and two become an empty nest in the arborvitae.

PICKLE POEM / H.T. Reynolds

a man bought a pickle—
brought it home for his wife

she was unimpressed,
asked him about the alligator
he said he took it to the vet,
waited for the receipt
but their fax machine
was broken
so they drew teeth,
and he lost,
wound up with a wallet
full of bills,
knew he needed
to bring home something—

the pickle

she was unimpressed
watched him peel himself—

the man’s flayed skin
falling like wet confetti

she took pleasure
in his ochre flesh
glistening slick curves
ligaments snapping
against his quivering
thumbs

she was unimpressed,
taking a bite of his pickle

October - Poem 7

A Call Coming from Inside The House  / Lilly Frank

It was a shocking discovery to find the mold on the undersides of her bones. Plagued fate, socially flawed, tortured inability, it all made sense now. The staleness of her crumbled into breadcrumbs, leading me back to the most familiar home I had known. Distance often becomes perspective. Perspective often becomes regret. Whether you chew the pill and taste the sour, or swallow it whole and choke on the size, the inevitable reality comes. You were familiar yet unkind. You were familiar yet calloused. A jaded reality parts from behind my eyes. A distorted kinship shatters into a stranger that you have seen undress themselves. A woman leaves the very home poisoning her, and would you imagine, the aches somehow went away? 

A Fool’s Villanelle  ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

I pray, though what I pray for I do not know.
Permit me please to deny the fury I fear.
The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.

Or choose to recline on a shore of status quo.
How deep is the ocean? I won’t ask unless it’s clear.  
I pray, though what I pray for I do not know.

I have a hunch that the warm waters are shallow
A chambered nautilus whispered in my ear:
The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.

No matter how long she paces to and fro
Digging deep into a path from which she won’t veer 
I pray, though what I pray for I do not know.

A dive without a safety net below;
An acceptance that weathering is never fair
and the fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.

Accustomed to the terrain, I learned alone
that rage against a loss won’t smooth from wear
The fool on the hill shall cross a chasm of sorrow.
I pray, though what I pray for I do not know.

Alice's Evidence / Kathryn Johnson

Who knew
that midlife would be such an adventure?

Is this why
I feel so much like the first girl
to fall down this particular rabbit hole?

Surely,
someone has been here before me.
There must have been
a series of other fallen girls. 

Who else
would leave the tonics and sweets,
so clearly labeled
for the next adventurer? 

Eat me.

Drink me. 

Were the pebbles I ate
like teacakes really a clue? 

The little door
that leads to the garden is open today,
and the sun glows where it shines on red roses.

I want to plant my own garden,
full of scruffy marigolds,
savory herbs, and
musty root vegetables.

A harvest
that can be made into
wines
and breads
and stews.

Delicacies
that I will package

and leave for the next girl.

i am / Kimberly McElhatten

of the blackberries in June, their bright-not-ripe-yet magenta and the temptation to pick the ones on the verge of ripeness that might turn my lips and fingertips bruised-knee purple

of the red-eyed vireos that come and go from a nest of hatchlings hung from a young ash, and of how they pass inchworms from each other to their chicks

of red clover on distant memory like an open field of my mother plucking one petal at a time, touching the nectar like clean honey to her tongue

of January skies laid out lapis and bluebird above Blue Knob with the touch of sun on my shoulders like a yellow hearth and soft snow spraying behind my skis

of peacocks with their necks strutting indigo and trailing viridescent eyes along the cornfields and cow pastures stretched between home and the longingness for somewhere else

of the green plateau that made me, of the plum mountains that remake me, and the burnt October sunsets of who i was & am becoming

EXPIRED LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR / H.T. Reynolds

A Golden Shovel after Emma Lazarus “The New Colossus”

Was it ever yours to give—
were any of us truly welcome
beyond the sea-washed gates—your
mild, commanding eyes growing tired
above your fragmented stone pedestal, your
baleful flame becoming solvent for the poor
bodies, the sacks of wind inflating with your
copper grin—the noxious tinge of green huddling
along walls, streets converging upon the masses
stripped bare and perpetually yearning.

Had no one told you there is no to-
gether, no tomorrow, no space to breathe
without the carcinogens, only the illusion of free
will, the inheritance of prescribed labor, the
roles assigned to us at birth by the wretched
percent who pollute our accords, then refuse
more your invitation, unleashing lightning—proof
this land no longer resembles your
promise, mother—a collection of walls teeming
with razor wire—blood and bones upon every shore.

October - Poem 6

Pas de Deux  / Lilly Frank

Trailing dirt inside of the house, boots cover the linoleum floor. A mosaic of homes now infiltrated mine; I feel apologetic to the worms, beetles, moles, trees. Awkwardly stumbling down the hallway to the mop, reminiscent of the ballet. Remembering the way my toes spun against the concrete flooring in the second-floor dance studio. I was one a child trailing dirt inside of the house, my boots covering the hardwood floor. I was once a child, laced in pointe shoes, leaping across what felt like a large sky, endless attempts of a pirouette.

Mop now in hand, I sober at the realization that my childhood lightness is no longer mine to claim. There is a mess covering the floor, there are dishes to be done, and there are things to be said.

I grip the mop tighter now, “Take the damn boots off.”

Haiku  ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

Haven't heard that song
since Kasey Kasem. Roll down
the windows again. 

The moon feels so close.
It leans in to listen to 
you, alone, howling.

moonshot / Kathryn Johnson

Sometime I picture mankind suspended between
Earth and sky. 

At least I do whenever I encounter a story about space. 
It’s like we are strung from one element to the next, 
our nature being both 
base and divine, 
dark and light. 

Like Artemis and Apollo,
the celestial twins. Or maybe 
the space programs designed 
to break free from 
our dirt-named home. 
To the moon. 
To Mars. 

Consider the massive crawler, 
a behemoth that moves 
our fastest vessels, 
only one mile each hour 
down a packed-earth path. 

It’s the sizeable counterpoint to 
the rocket’s escape velocity and 
built by miners. 

Our ability to touch the sky 
made possible by 
our expertise in 
digging 
down 
down 
down 
into 
the 
ground. 

In this book, I want to write… / Kimberly McElhatten

I want to write about mountains—
            The way their trees turn green
                        after winter, spring after spring.

 I want to write about my grandfathers—
           The way they grew gardens
                        on plots the size of their homes, season after season.

 I want to write about my grandmother Dot—
            The way she put up peaches
                       in a dirt-floor cellar, jar after jar.

 I want to write about my other grandmother—
           The way she made applesauce
                        on the stovetop, autumn after autumn.

 I want to write about fireflies—
           The way they light up fields
                        across western PA, June after June.

 I want to write about opioids—
           The way they wind themselves
                        into our too muches & not enoughs, gram after gram.
                                               
I want to write about natural gas—
            The way fracking can taint a wallet
                        with big dreams of bigger houses, derrick after derrick.

 I want to write about welfare checks—
           The way they pay for milk and bread
                        for mouths like mine, month after month.  

 I want to write about the wind—
           The way it whittled our ridges
                        from peaks to knobs, strata after strata.

 I want to write about creeks and rivers—
           The way they carved the valleys
                        through our mountains, bend after bend.  

I want to write poems—
            The way the words alight
                        on the page, line after line.

THIS RED COLOSSUS / H.T. Reynolds

October - Poem 5

Memory Lane  / Lilly Frank

I keep this eclectic collection of garbage in a shoebox in
my closet. The bud from the first cigarette I ever smoked,
a broken shoelace from the stranger I met at a metal show,
a now faded movie stub from 2012, the first teeth my dog
lost in a plastic bag, the list goes on. Anyways, this
garbage, I can recall. I pinpoint each piece of memorabilia
down to the second in which I was existing, doing
something, meaning something to someone else. I
suppose it is the nostalgia of living a sweeter life. I
suppose it is the nostalgia of bliss, and naïve loving that
cozies up inside of my chest when I revisit the decrepit
box every year or so. And then there is the sting. The
recollection of what I have lost, the life I no longer live,
the youth that is now behind me, the whimsy that has
deteriorated, and the heart that has become so fractured,
that I haven’t added much to the box in years. I once felt
important, loved, cherished, and valued. I once felt these
pieces of my life – these silly and obsolete pieces of my
life, were incredibly special. Gray clouds fill the inside of
my mind, I’ve been waiting to see the sun, to see the light,
the reason, the purpose, again, for years.
What are you supposed to do when the fondest moments
of your life are merely foggy memories and tattered
artifacts? 

The Backpack ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

The Tuff Stuff backpack comes in rainbow            

                         unicorn    

       and        blue       sailboat. 

Sizes         

                                            3T                 

to                  

       8Y

Bulletproof Levels                    

IIIA for protection from most common handguns. III designed to stop common rifle rounds. And III+ for protection from AK-47s and AR-15s. 

Zipper   pockets                       on interior 

for     loose          items            like 

                     pencils and

erasers.

                        Convenient 

                outer            pockets 

for easy access            to a water bottle

or a 

cell phone. 

Adjustable              

straps 

so       your                                student      

                        can                         wear 

     her 

Tuff 

Stuff 

backpack 

comfortably 

from the first day            of               the school year 

                                     to   

the last. 

                                                                  Keep 

your              loved 

                                   ones           

                                  stylish,  

safe from gunfire, 

                                                                      and

                                prepared

at ​a ​cross ​country ​meet / Kathryn Johnson

Watching the mob of JV boys
make the turn and run
up the hill in front of us reminds me
my life is not a race.

The day is hot, with full sun.
Many of these young men are already
red-faced and grim before
they reach the one-mile marker.

But so many of these flushed faces
belong to little boys who haven’t crossed
the invisible line marking the finish
of their baby fat years. This also reminds me
that, even if life is a race,
we each have our own course to follow.

The friend beside me cheers herself
hoarse for her son. She’s the one
who helps me pace myself. I hope
to do the same for her, so that each of us
may reach milestones in our own time.

At Lookout Point Mount Ararat, August 24, 2020 / Kimberly McElhatten

Just west of Schellsburg on Route 30
night shoots up the Allegheny Front
where dozens of activists—men,
mothers, and
little children—
clear Lookout Point Mount Ararat
by foot.

They have come seven hundred
miles from Milwaukee
along the Lincoln Highway—
tired of asking for justice.

While walking the roads through Indiana, police
barred their access to gas stations for restroom breaks.
In Ohio, people driving by threw food.

 
In Pennsylvania,
just west of Schellsburg on
the highway—
it’s the kind of response they had anticipated. 

 
Just one mile ahead, sit before them,
actions more complicated than
life and death and good and evil,
where you don’t
see a lot of black
people and there’s a
reason for it
because they’re not
welcome—

one mile ahead. They’ll break
a little too long, in this 
rural part of
dark, dark, dark, dark
Pennsylvania,
and a man will walk
up the Lincoln Highway,
shooting in the air—
shooting in the air.

 
Then—
he will snap
a warning and
spray buckshot [not] like a firehose
into the men with
—mothers and
little children.

 One mile ahead,
the eyes of all people will be upon
exiles in their own land.

 
*Words in italics have been taken from newspaper articles and eye-witness reports, as well as Martin Luther King’s speech, “I Have a Dream,” and John Winthrop’s, “Dreams of a City on a Hill, 1630.”

LADY EGGDRED ADDRESSES THE CONGREGATION / H.T. Reynolds

We’re all dragon today
awaiting the knight
seeking our soulless
profit—our mattered,
promised salivation
to liver this piece to us
as palm rust cell vocation

her sun crown bloomed through the stain glass—Daniel’s head dangling from Aslan’s jowls/Moses
water skiing on stone tablets dragged behind a large arc piloted by Noah and a peacock holding a
Coor’s Light/Adam massaging a migraine at a breakfast table while Eve drips drops of a tincture
into a snake smoothie in the background/an elaborate table filled with food encircled by twelve
empty chairs/a naked man holding his palms together in prayer while fire erupts from his crotch.

Lady EggDred descends from the pulpit, retrieves her clutch of thirteen polished emerald eggs that
leak whisps of black smoke like corrupted dry ice in her stainless-steel basket, and finds a seat next
to a thin-boned man displaying an Armani suit like a wireframed manakin. He rouses, slightly, once
her blood feathers seep into his grey matter, lances his pale skin with an infecting desire to
stand—he does, and retreats through the emergency double-door exit, the mahogany pew bloating
rancid boils where he sat, spreading like an eclipse’s shadow until the room is bathed in night. Her
eggs radiate the eyes of her lord—speaking,

“Sleep, all that may be so…”

She, too, closes her eyes—though the sleep is not for her—and listens to the dimming pulse of a
room, a room that did not heed her warning, her words falling like the mass molt that will be her
signature.

TO BE CONTINUED

October - Poem 4

Insincere Form / Lilly Frank

Seldom do the words fit themselves in between my lips in the way they are intended to. Usually, what is meant to be an act of courage comes out as, it’s okay, I’m sorry. The shallow breath filling weak lungs bite at limp ankles. Reminded of an existing pulse by the heartbeat felt in the throat, kneel to the curb. Forehead in shaking palms, the inside of the cheek an apple to the teeth. Toes tap the concrete ground. The sun had been setting for five hours. The same breeze whipping over thin skin since the conversation had begun. To gut the soul of truth, stifle the flames of passion. The heart decays into a carcass. Only left with hands, what is there to do with them now? Seldom do they fit themselves in between the fingers of someone who may reanimate spirit. 

St. Louis Sonnets Three ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

Who would want to read about
another suburban religious school
like the one you grew up in.
In the 1980's, the lady
who lived next to the playground
had Charlie's Angel hair
gave out chocolates from a box.
It was ok to take the candy.
Whether one-hundred degrees
or fifteen, we were locked outside
until class time. In winter, we'd race
to hug the warm pipes. In summer
we'd fight over squares of shade, a slight
relief from the heat of the blacktop.

Are you Black? A question 
I heard more than once.
What's Filipino? The follow-up 
to my response. In spring
tornado drills, foreheads pressed 
against the wall, a windowless 
hallway is filled with kids
fingers laced behind the neck.
Knuckles will protect you from shards
in one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds.
In twenty-twelve, intruder drills
a game of hide-and-seek
Who can be the quietest? Today
slide desks behind the door. Don't forget

To use your textbook
as a buffer for your organs
your heart, your brain … 
The teacher reminds them
of someone they’ve seen on
Tik-Tok. They miss the days
before COVID-19, sprinting to
the field behind school. One more shot 
at the goal. Time to go home
Home, for some, is never
without war. They’re
reminded, still, of the good
old days, of singing hymns 
On earth as it is in heaven.

I overslept again today. / Kathryn Johnson

It’s an upside-down day, and I can’t seem
to find the start. I’m looking, but do not see
the little satisfying thread I can pull, then watch
the full tangle of the day unravel and lie smooth.

It’s a little like the feeling, when the city tests the tornado sirens,
in that moment between hearing them wail
and remembering it’s the first Wednesday of the month.

Or the small serving of despair
when you can’t find your glasses on the nightstand
in the dim light of dawn.

And even more like the panicked mortification when you are the only one talking
in an odd moment of silence, the kind that descends in every gathering.
And of course, you’re sharing an intimate detail about a trip to the dermatologist or
oversharing information about your dog’s habit of digging unspeakable waste
from the bathroom trash. It’s never a delightful anecdote or a wise word. Instead,
it’s a twisting knot in the pit of the stomach. A meal flavored with fear,
seasoned with angst, and finished with a light dusting of shame.

This is the anxious mess of a day that I try to keep at bay
with my little lists and plentiful reminders. And when they fail me,
and I find myself scratching at the edges to find that little loose thread?
Then it’s time
to locate a cat to pet or
to refill the teacup or
to demand a long hug from my husband.

Humble rituals, practiced like choreography,
that unwind the knot,
quiet the noise, and
help me find what I’m looking for
on this page.

The Weight a Mountain Carries / Kimberly McElhattenPAINTER’S BOX / H.T. Reynolds

On a hike up a deer path local runners call Throat Punch, the weight of my breath thumps in my chest as I take one more step, reach for a striped maple above me, pull myself to it, rest the bulk of my body on its trunk, feel my shoulders slump into its bark, and wait for my lungs and heart to resynchronize. Each September, people run this trail for fun, but I’m here with friend, retired Army Ranger, George hunting for the Cadillac an alleged meth dealer abandoned two days ago during a police chase that landed him deep in the mountain on logging roads cut in the sixties after the Air Force abandoned the Blue Knob missile defense base during the Cold War and DCNR merged half of it into a state park and an investor turned the other half into a ski resort. Earlier that day, the resort manager texted me, asking if I knew anything about Needle Trail because he was looking for a Cadillac, he wrote, but I think he meant Needle Patch. A trail race map asks runners to image themselves on the trail as if they are fleas racing along a dog’s back, dodging the saplings like hair. So I’m here ascending Throat Punch with George to get to Needle Patch the only way we know how, even though we’ll later find our way home following a trail of rearview mirrors, reflectors, an edge guard, a headlight, and a box of meth pipes and lollipops through the water seeps, up the switchbacks, and back to Ridge Run where my condo sits, but before that, at the top of Throat Punch on at the start of Needle Patch, we find the black Cadillac with a black cherry sapling trapped between the bumper and passenger-side tire—car windows down, no keys, floss picks on the floor mats, and an empty gap around the stereo, its trim ring removed.

When I get home, a neighbor sends me the local news article, “Man who claimed to be laying on a bomb arraigned, charged with trespassing, criminal mischief,” and I read another, “Police: Blair County man in underwear hides in basement, claims to be a bomb.” Both explain what happened after the Cadillac got hung up on the sapling. The man in these articles is the man the condo board tried to evict when so much got so complicated during the pandemic. He’s also the man who broke into a local warehouse, dumped inventory into a pile, and doused it with gasoline, the man who police found and arrest before he could find a lighter, the man who a judge released on bail three weeks after,  and then the man who then found himself being chased by the police down double track and eventually Needle Patch.  

I imagine him getting the Cadi stuck in the saplings, the back-and-forth attempts to get it unstuck, his panic, his paranoia, his running through this forest and down the mountain, fleeing the weight of his clothes. This reminds me of a morning years ago and the two women I found walking on Overland Pass—how they spent a night lost on the mountain after jumping out of a pickup truck, choosing the thick fog over a drunken boyfriend. And I remember the young man I found along the state park road on a different day, unsure of his way, trying to find Altoona, and walking in the wrong direction—how he told me someone brought him up the mountain, locked him in a condo, wouldn’t let him out—how when I dropped him at the police station, the trouble he had giving directions—and how he finally asked to call home and for a ride to a gas station. I think of my brother-in-law and how he died cresting Meadow Mountain on his motorcycle—of the toxicology report that read meth, oxy, fentanyl, THC—and how life might have felt like a dark bunker before the weight of him found flight. I consider George and how, on our hike home from the Cadillac, he said he’s mostly adjusted from his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, how deployment prevented he and his wife from having kids, how loud noises don’t get to him like other vets, but how he can’t listen to taps, and how he didn’t need to say more. And I think about our mountains, these Alleghenies, about the weight they carry—how they hold the heaviness of our too muches, too hards, and not enoughs, the things we can’t or won’t, our unbearables and unthinkables—and, yet, ask nothing of us in return.

PAINTER’S BOX / H.T. Reynolds

after Julien Raimond (1744-1801)

a mother shapes a body
through each chamber
of her own—cell by cell
she divides ‘til hollowed
out an offering to be raised

a line is divided over
and over, ‘til the land
becomes known to strangers
and the fenceposts stand
gawking—twitch hand ready

she is called mother
to those speaking in hush
hoods that dull her cries like
snow—they wait for her tinge,
a barren gunny sack of color

but a painter can craft a sky
never knowing Indigo,
who she bloomed from
or how many stripes of flesh
hang from her belt

October - Poem 3

Sacrifice, Compromise, and Suffocation / Lilly Frank

Swallowed by the scent of chamomile and fresh linen, I wipe the slate clean with the very cloth you had thrown in the wash to rinse out the stain of my blood. The grand finale felt as if it had come too soon – it seems that in love it always does. I swallowed the teeth you had knocked from my gums down the back of my throat. I smiled, I laughed, and I had never felt so alone. The start of each morning was reminiscent of a psychological horror film. Feverishly, I bargained with myself. If I could survive this, I could meet the version of you that had been hiding underneath your guise of whatever manhood meant to you, which seemingly, was everything. I endured. Faith deteriorated into defeat. My spine contorted into whatever shape fit your torso nicest, most comfortably for you. My interests morphed themselves to intertwine with yours. My fingers wrote delicately, calculated, and ultimately, dishonest. Losing sight of my personhood felt like a small price to pay to experience yours, no matter how cold.

Sometimes, time heals. Sometimes, time is a silent death sentence. And sometimes, time doesn’t really matter at all. Retrospect wags her finger in my face for the distasteful way I had spent her. The future opens her arms to me, and I am too cowardly to jump into them.

St. Louis Sonnet Two ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

Are you Black? A question 

I heard more than once.

What's Filipino? The follow-up 

to my response. In spring

tornado drills, foreheads pressed 

against the wall, a windowless 

hallway filled with kids, fingers

laced behind the neck. Knuckles

will help protect you from broken bits

in one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds.

In twenty twelve, intruder drills

a game of hide-and-seek

Who can be the quietest? Today

slide desks behind the door. Don't forget.

Inez / Kathryn Johnson

I've set a clipboard at a precarious angle
at the edge of the cabinet. I'm hoping
to deter and condition the kitten who insists
on seeking out new ways to reach the top
of the neighboring shelves.

She is a persistent little beast.
I've realized in recent years that
what annoys me—circumstances, people, cats—
is too often a reflection of some flaw I see in myself.
And if this mittened kitten is a mirror,
what do I see shining back from her sleek sides?

It shames me to admit how much alike we are.
She prowls through the house,
sniffing, pouncing, and napping,
in very much the same way I move through life.
I sample and taste new ideas,
growing bored with too much ease.
I also jump from moment to moment,
looking for the quick kill,
treating the work of my life like play—
or sometimes the converse:
I snap my jaws around the neck of an odd
moment of pleasure and shake the life out of it.
I, too, sleep in the midst of the daily hustle and bustle
that could be my greatest source of nourishment and joy.

But I am at my most feline when I echo
the kitten’s expeditionary ways.
Swiping under the couch, whether
in search of lost toys or imagined monsters.
Jumping up and onto places
I have no business being. Once,

she caught her back paw in the footboard and
scared us both. I held and soothed her,
checking for blood or breakage.
She leapt down from my arms,
shook off my concern,
and went back to exploring.
May I someday be like her in this way, too.

The Turning / Kimberly McElhatten

Cento from poems in The Bridge Lit Journal, Volume 5

Late afternoon today I returned to the bench at the end of the woods,
right after I closed the book, after I had just seen
a field of doe eyes staring back at me.

The fact of being a mother is that you will learn to bend
like aspens over a fast brook
while the distant pines snap and seep.  

It was the kind of raw Saturday—
[with] a persistent wind blowing.

A lie I tell myself:
I didn’t know I was going to age like this—
I must be an animal—
but it’s as if I drove through the earth to see how old I could become.

The fact is that you cannot go back.
They say it’s better
to lean in, to observe before acting. And yes,
I remember summer on the other side of the door.
I remember that winter each morning was [is] a bundle of
problems you [I][we] don’t have—
They deserve your [my][our] close attention.

 When I die, scatter my ashes
Up there, [where] the sky matches the steel—
[where] time is not welcome there, beyond—
[where] there is no angel to stop me—
[where] everything [is] holding its breath, waiting for the turn[ing].

DEADBOLT TUMBLER / H.T. Reynolds

you can’t make love
without the penetration
can’t form a home
without cheating the woods
another day
can’t become one—soul
without first finding her edges
fitting your points together like teeth
turning—forming the forward motion,
a clockwork expiration
made like a diary, a pink thumbprint
promise birthed after
your key finds the lock
twists,
and all becomes clear

October - Poem 2

The Closet / Lilly Frank

Like a dog, I know it is better to be violent
than dead. I will claw my way through this
cage if it is the last thing I do, taking my
last breath as I tear open the metal bars
above. Using my every ounce of malice,
spite, and grief to fuel this endeavor. I
refuse to let the words that you left
lingering inside of me be the last I hear. I
refuse to let the hands of you be the last to
touch me. Devastation is usually found in
the chest; a hollow frame that once held a
heart now sits, labored with this plague of
disappointment. Clamoring to be released
from inside of you, it turns into anger. It
turns into bitterness and distrust. It eats
you alive until you are practically skeletal,
flesh hanging from the bone, clinging to
the most familiar home it has ever known.

St. Louis Sonnet ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

Who would want to read about another
suburban religious school
like the one you grew up in. In the 1980's
the lady, who lived by the playground
gave out chocolates from a box. 
She had hair like a Charlie's Angel. 
It was ok to take the candy. 
Whether one-hundred degrees or fifteen, we were locked outside until it was time
to go in. In winter, we'd race inside 
to hug the warm pipes, once the doors
finally opened again. In summer,
we'd fight over squares of shade, a slight
relief from the heat of the blacktop. 

geosmin / Kathryn Johnson

Each time I encounter the word
petrichor is like the first time—
the rush of delight at its beauty, with the soft sigh
for a word that is as lovely as the reality it describes.

It’s easy to forget that words are signs, indicators
of something else in the world. Like petrichor,
the sweet, savory, dusty scent of rain on dry earth.
The smell is beautiful, yes, but
it exists only to point the way to
what is needed. I learned today
that the perfume of rain on soil
is the perfume of bacteria,

those little pieces of living matter that go ahead
and trail behind us. Microorganisms,
tiny beings, that require water, like we do.
And isn’t it interesting, fascinating, amazing that
we have this in common with dirt dwellers?
That they send us a sign, like little smoke signals,
microplumes of dust rising from the ground
with each drop of rain, to point the way
to our common good?

I want more little moments like these.
Don’t you?
Small, natural efforts to show I care
and have concern for my fellows.
Men, women, bird, and beast.
And even the tiny denizens beneath our feet,
who remind me that we all—all of us—
share common needs.

Our forms are different.
Our purposes may diverge.
Our paths may never cross. 

But why should that keep
me from releasing good into the air?
Or slow my hand when it needs extending, open and ready?
Or pause when I can share the tiny talents
I am blessed to tote around with me in my travels?

How much better to scatter them wherever I go,
and shower the Earth with signs that tell you
someone cares. To spread a sweet offering,
like drops of rain, that will let you—let all of us—
breathe deep the earthy, heady scent of petrichor.

How to Climb an Apple Tree / Kimberly McElhatten

You must know the bark of its trunk, the bends of its branches. You must know its intersections and how the tree comes together, how it stands. You must be sure of the weight its branches can bear and be sure to measure its flexibility against your own weight. You must know the tree will hold you, and you, in return, can hold the tree. You must know the best time to climb is August, when the sun blushes the apples red and before its boughs slump under the burden and drop the fruit taken with sweet rot. Know the more you climb, the easier your eyes will decipher the map of Ys and help you ascend higher and higher to where you imagine you can reach your head above the canopy and peer across the whole orchard to the peaches and cherries and beyond to the willows and chestnuts. Know you’ll continue to hear the words—That’s high enough—hold you and hold you back. Know you’ll remember your grandfather’s papered hands teaching you to make out the map of footholds that you’ll eventually navigate alone, with limbs so heavy in harvest you’ll imagine that perhaps the tree bears enough fruit to feed you there forever and never have need to return home, where there are no branches like these branches to hold you.   

ENTER LADY EGGDRED / H.T. Reynolds

abashed the chicken stood
and felt her awfully thick thighs
the balding patches—blistered hind
twitching next to her bare basket,
her oozing garden of pin feathers
matted yolks and receding cluck,
a reverberation in her beak
split and jaded jaundice

her glycerin eyes seep corrosive
drops tinkling to boiling splotches
of brimstone filling her basket
foul, glazed down—slick red

“There ain’t no coming back,”

she wheezes—wisps of smoke
like tendrils of miasmic string
lassoing the space between her crown
and heaven above—the sizzling hop
down—a tipped over stool after father
had found her out of the house,
out of breath, shivering sweat—smiling

“I know,”

A voice sublimes from the
scorched stone below her feet,
a reverberating heat she no longer
feels, the blood a lattice of glass
within her webbed feet.

“So be it.”

The chicken gasps—
the city resumes its motion,
reilluminated by the noon sun—
bodies racing for food, like streams
of ants she tastes with her rancid beak
gauged toward the sky like a vane.

The sidewalk settles.

The chicken settles—
a collection of black feathers
drifting to her feet,
erupting into embers
none in the human crowd sees.

She empties her basket,
proceeds forward,
leaving the blooming darkness
behind her—knowing not to look
back…

TO BE CONTINUED

October - Poem 1

Joanne / Lilly Frank

I come from a generation of women, as we all do. Mothers, who are daughters, and inside of them, little girls. I come from a generation of women who experienced heartbreak, as we all do. Adolescence, kindling a warmth that will become a fire, which evolves into the deep passion and love they hold closely to their chest, bellies, and fists, for their daughters. My mother, arguably, the bravest girl of them all. I recall during my teenage years, my lack of acknowledgement for her triumph, for her strife. While I was wrangling my girlhood experience, I regretted to remember that my mother, yes, growing older, and yes, older than me, was still in her heart, wrangling her own experience with girlhood. Because the little girl you once were never leaves you. She is your home; her undertakings live inside of you. While many of the stories are silent, and she remains stoic, there is a young version inside of her who is still, in a scrambling attempt to understand how life could become so much bigger than yourself, attempting to survive. My mother has always been beautiful, radiant, and tenderhearted. I often reflect on the sliver of experiences in which she has shared with me in times of weakening – they serve as a reminder to show your teeth when backed into a corner, but never bite. My mother, to me, is still a girl. She is just as human as I am. My mother, my mother. The little girl who lives in me, will always see her as her mommy. The little girl who lives, the young woman who lives in me, the grown woman I am, all in a synchronist rhythm, have grown to understand that my mother is not only the woman who raised me, but she too, is just a girl. And she too, will carry that young girl inside of her for the rest of her life. Motherhood, while a responsibility, is also a choice. My mother chose motherhood in every instance, selflessly, thanklessly, and bravely. Her mother chose motherhood in a different way from her, and her mother, I’m certain the same. There are no guarantees, there are no handbooks or wishes. How lucky I am to experience girlhood with her, my mother, the girl she once was, and still is. 

 ​A Mentor, a Mirror ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

I want to go in the back yard now
This game is foul,
How it picks you up and drops you back down
Even swans got boxing gloves for heads
I am everything classic and true

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
Performances, assortments, resumes -
Vulnerable how my fire sways
Boy wonder becomes Boy Wanderer
A new life is a mirror, it is a pair of glasses.

A cento made from lines of poems from The Oxford Anthology of Poetry (2006), poetryfoundation.org,diodepoetry.com, and Brick by Brick: Dreams We Build, Volume 5, written by some of my former students. Authors in order: Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Worth, Cathy Park Hong, Sch’erica Wilson, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Patick Gutierrez, Gerald Burton, Apollo Chastain.

 ​speleothems / Kathryn Johnson

When you close your eyes,
is it dark? Dark like night,
with little sequin stars reflecting
in the sky of your eyelids? Or
like a movie theater, lights dimmed
before the film rolls, unspooling a story
in the glow of carefully-lit exit signs?
Or is it dark like a cave is dark?

 The first time I spent a weekend caving,
and the guide told us to turn off all our lights,
I waited for fear to tap me on my shoulder
and whisper little stories of death and other dangers
in the dark. Imagine my surprise when it never
took a seat on the rock beside me.

 And instead of feeling a shrinking, sucking dread,
I felt my heart, my head, my whole self,
expand to fill the dark. I became the cave,
holding bats, spiders, rocks, water,

 and even people. Those tiny spelunkers
crawling downdowndown
past my cave-mouth,
using little lights to show the way.
Lights that flicker like stars in the sky,
that lead them to the exit and out again
into the woods, with eyes wide open and
blinking in the sun. When our guide
switched his headlamp back on,
I was predictably disoriented.

 Was I still the cave? Was I now afraid?
Was I still home to little flying and crawling thoughts?
Do I still hold the lights inside me? Or

must I now crawl my own way up and out?


Remember Him Before / Kimberly McElhatten

Remember him with his hair tied at the nape and it falling forward over his shoulder in dense, black waves over his hospital gown. Remember you, just after you exhaled from the womb, held in the heft of his hay-heaving arms and his hospital gown. Remember his wide, white-toothed smile. 

Remember him before he wrote the captions for a comic that got him fired just ahead of the plant closure, how there wasn’t a severance or another job at another plant, and how when you started kindergarten, he was there every morning to make soft-boiled eggs;  

Before the attic bedroom smelled like the dog after a good skunking, his friends making quick and frequent visits, the day a cop car turned into our driveway, and he escaped through a back window and into the woods before the police noticed; 
Before the welfare checks and the line for rice and cheese and powdered milk, the seventeen percent interest mortgage, the whiskey and beer and Anbesol on his breath, and the fury he carried in his fists and feet;
Before he stopped brushing his teeth and holding your mother’s hand and kissing you and your brother good night, and before he spent evenings and weekends in the basement smoking Marlboros in front of a twelve-inch TV watching Roseanne and Rush Limbaugh; 
Before the joke he liked to tell, the one where he said, when he found out you were a girl, he had wanted to throw you like a kitten into a sack with rocks and then toss you into French Creek, and how this joke seemed funnier to him the more he told it and how it started with throw and ended with toss and the care and carelessness of these words; 
Remember him through the memory of photographs, the way they track memories before you have memories, and remember, he had wanted you once before.

ARE WE SURE THIS IS DEATH / H.T. Reynolds

@ Lhasa De Sela “Soon This Place Will Be too Small”

Submerge yourself back into that slick
existence of wrinkled skin and blooming bones—

if you were to experience that again—
your birth in reverse,
a dehydrating vocabulary
weeping from your pours,
your stories mother will mourn,
nursing you back at her breast
her palms clutching the sun’s sickling
grief

—be still, mother
he will become again
that blister
consuming your golden locker

draw him back
like a cigarette,
open your purse,
tuck him at the bottom—
be whole, again.

Small mush.
dwindling boy.

This is death—

You are stardust becoming
diamond—a nucleus of someday I will—

can you hear her speaking,
cradling your wilting body,
her hand palming you flat
—someday I will…

Would your last memory be
the chill of the world receding,
submerging into weightlessness,
an imploding body