For My Nephew in His Seventeenth Year / Joanna Grant
It’s been raining too much for weeks, and I don’t know what kind of world we’re giving you. It’s May and as I walk through a strangely empty city sirens ring out in the distance. Some uneasy emergency, somewhere. As the clouds roll in, the damp wind cuts to the bone. In the eaves of my building pigeons huddle for warmth in their scatters of down and odd twigs. How does it all hold together. Somewhere close by, dogs bark, they howl, are they tame, are they feral? How strange that you used to be a tiny boy, and now you are a man, with no memory of how I held you on my lap when you were a baby, and your delicate pink hand grasped at my breast as if it would somehow swell at the touch, as if the nipple might yield you its miraculous milk, and, for a moment, I thought it might, too.
Holdvilág-árok1 Judit Hollos
Jjudit-20If you call X Twitter, is it deadnaming? (or; the incoherence of whiteness) / Zach Hauptman
If-you-call-X-Twitter-is-it-deadnamingtwo boughs / Brice Maiurro
i asked the deciduous trees
what do you call this motion
of flowering to fruiting to dormancy
just to return to flower again
i asked the coniferous trees
why this consistency
this evergreen force in the face
of frost & fire & flood & smoke
i wait a while for the answer
until the day pulls me elsewhere
I’ll Bet You Think This Poem Is About You / Kimberly O’Connor
after Carly Simon
You gave away the things you loved
and one of them was me.
Your lies were an apricot scarf
you gave away. The things you loved
evaporate like rain, rip like a web woven
and walked through. You planted seeds
and gave away the things that grew. You loved
one of them. It was not me.
This is Why I Run / Michael Schad
I used to run when I was young because I was always angry
some days if felt like I had swallowed a hive of bees
and as they were slowly being digested they were sending
their stinger directly into the walls of my stomach
as a last ditch way to say, “screw you, who eats bees”!
I think I ran angry too, meaning I’d sprint the first mile
and then try to get home at a reasonable rate exhausted,
and by the time I was home the last of bees were gone.
Later in my twenties I ran to stay or get sober, my mind became
an existential playground,I drank too much, so I ran,
not as much as I should have run, but I’d run until the sweat
slicked over my whole body and I could feel my wind unravel.
In my thirties, I ran to get outside and to move my body,
also to remember how great it feels to run with abandonment,
but to know that I had not abandoned my life and beautiful wife.
Now I run because my legs are tight, my back hurts and I want
to keep moving in order to outrun my own eventual demise.
Tempering Inheritance / Kashiana Singh
Garam masala—
dadi’s unmeasured
love, wafting from tin-lidded time.
Fried garlic clings—
embarrassment
lingering in aromas
no scrubbing can lift.
Stubborn turmeric—
keeps her past alive,
weathered hands
dyeing yellow into everything.
And tempering—
the crackle, the smoke—
of sarson-ka-saag,
his last meal.
a silence salted into taste.
Opened In The Front / Elizabeth Wolf
We sit in the waiting room
gowns open in the front
loosely tied, maybe a robe,
but who cares. Most of our breasts
are scarred. Some of our breasts
are rebuilt with our own fat.
We don’t stare at hair.
Most of us hold phones
or books or magazines but
no one is really reading or texting
as we wait without powder
as we wait without deodorant
hoping to get called back into the hall
by a nurse or a tech or anyone
who isn’t an actual oncologist.
Every three months or six months
or after an entire year
we go in for imaging
and wait.
