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

September - Poem 30

My hands surprise me like a wolf / Cento composed by Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Mother / Yael Aldana

Not everything you say is going to be profound / Catherine Bai

music is just a kind of color
a strange pause
like driving in the rain
and passing under a bridge
sometimes the bridge is the best part
you see the chorus with fresh eyes
it’s emotional all over again

Things That are Worthy of Poetry / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

What is inside the leaf

bright silver white lining

even the fleshiest of living things

The certainty that one day

all of this will no longer be

The grocery list: eggs again, milk again

Food for the cat. An overdue bill

The house down the street 

In expectant silence

Remedies for arthritis: mauby bark, moringa

Monkeys trying to find their way back 

to the dwindling forest

Capybaras lost in parking lots

Bioluminescence startling itself around ankles

All contained within music and colour

All within the limits of the word

XXX / Kendra Brooks

“The consequence of desire” ?
Sounds like a species of wild flower:
A powdery, pulpy stingy bloom
Too lumpy to press inside a book
More of a miniscule scented jewell
Than a delicate, abundant beauty.
Good thing the bees know their duty.
Only sunlight cools the flame!
Know if you play, heartbreak
wins the game. Two steps forward
Then back to square one.
Lust is barrels of fun and
Attraction is a blast but when
It comes to the consequences
The love connection rarely lasts.
So travel light and pack for rain
When you board the love train.
Trust, desire has its consequences
And may change your destination.

Cafe Promenade / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I’ve always wanted to rhyme love with chrysanthemums. 
My goals are somewhat random—to find a use for the word  
lagoon or chasm, stay away from the orgasmic hue of blue  
some flowers flatten you with. “What is Magic 
The Gathering?” a kid asks her parents. We chortle into 
our coffee cups. I try not to overhear the eager explanation.  
Let’s lose ourselves in steam, hot and brightening. This is  
not your typical watering hole. There’s a whole landscape  
on the upper part of the wall. The paint has layers of texture,  
trees that feel dimensional. We’re ringed with Bob Ross Rocky  
Mountains. Knobby humps of crust push up and nestle a forest. 
How soon a room turns into something else entirely. 
What even was this place before? Just under the forest is a door  
that doesn’t go anywhere. Brass knocker, peaked eve, the bronze  
face of a god or lion sleeping in the freeze. So easily. 
It’s prom season—no—homecoming. A jingle of highschoolers 
stop in, sporting the wildest flower-ribbon exhibits. Love, 
mums, school spirit—what magic could even describe it? 

A Prayer and a Pep Talk for My 62nd Birthday / Yvette Perry

It’s alright now, baby, game’s over                       
olly olly oxen free
come out, come out, wherever you are
you don’t have to pretend anymore
time for the grand finale, the big reveal
everyone’s in the parlor ready for you 
to unmask whodunnit
dance like everybody can see you, and 
they’re cheering enthusiastically 
slide across home base: you may not be 
safe, but no one really ever is
be you/do you, just say yes
I think I can, I think I can—
you thought you could and
you did
you got this, smooth sailing now,
everything’s blossoming roses
it’s like riding a bicycle—you never really forget
don’t call it a comeback
you’ve been here forever, ten toes
down and head to the sky
eyes to the heavens, hair blowing in the wind
feel the breeze on your face and the sun on your lips
feel what joy feels like
feel what unbothered and unbewildered feels like
feel what having all the fucks you could ever
want but choosing to give away nary a one feels like
keep all your marbles, have and eat your cake
it’s alright, now, baby, it’s all right this time
it’s time
it’s time 
for you

Scholar / Amber Wei

Learn about me
when the books
no longer call you by your name
when identity is misspoken
because it is difficult to replace character with
emotional maturity
So heighten your gaze to the setting sun
lowering your sight
to the shoreline
where the distance
is seen light with
overbearing reflection
knowing that you were somehow
somewhere
the searing pain
light only knew as the moment
the distance showed that heat is
not an illusion
but rather the ominous
emanating of the day’s end
a cycle from which we have 
not graduated,
but rather, look to a new day

Ghost Towns and the Creative Imaginary, Part V  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 29

Carnival Glass / Yael Aldana

If you knew me before
and looked through me then
as if I were made of
milky carnival glass
but find me worthy
in my after.
ribbed in success
bloated with promise
brined with accolades.
you’ll  never make it though
my heart’s
meshed metal sheathing
as I was always worthy
even as a woman in cheap
yellow dress at the carnival
with only a dollar
to play Wack-a-Mole

Missing You / Catherine Bai

messages trickle into my phone
there’s no one to text
you’re off in the real world
in my room I reread the signs
beautiful people on the train don’t phase me
I cry when I read a poem
and can’t share it with you

Communion / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I birthed him slick and wild as an otter,
riverine, black eyed and bound to no saviour
but undercurrents of thirst.

Our bright world of noise frightened him.
The first years he spent bound to my chest
|with a length of knotted cloth, small fingers
tangled in the estuaries of my hair.

I whispered prayers without shapes
into the swirled shell of his ear.
I fed him all the milk this body
could bear.

Now you ask what he might become.
Outside, his laughter rises, like mist,
into the agile certainty of air.

We talk about our children as though
our hands hold back the river’s flow.
The truth is, no mother knows what will grow.

In my dreams, I went alone into the darkness
to find him, in the rift where everything
and nothing lives

We build a life on a bridge made from breath.
All is tide. All is waiting.
Time flicks its tail in the depths
between us, vast and silent.

Our children come to us
along submerged pathways of spirit.
Love is a sacred crossroad,
a place where many rivers flow

In the great river’s fractured light,
we are all different beasts come here to drink.
We were all led here by the same thirst.

XXIX / Kendra Brooks

Did you think I wouldn’t 
miss you,
or not notice you
had left? 
Your keys are no longer hanging 
from the little hook in the hall.
Your car’s not in the driveway.
Did you leave your gardening gloves
on the fence, out back
the birds are still chirping
the syllables of your name.
I see you’ve taken your mismatched socks 
and your reading glasses from beside the bed.
You’ve gone completely
as if you thought you should. 
The mirror misses your side glances, 
and the day has slowed its pace. 
I knew I’d lose you the day I found you
a heart does not need love to break.

Safari / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Racer X / Yvette Perry

The first man I ever wanted drove a fast yellow car
and always wore shades. I wanted so badly to ride next to him.
I imagined him pulling the harness over my head,
securing it at my shoulders and around my waist and hips.
I could see me touching his hand gently through his red gloves
as it rested on the stick shift.

He’d look over at me. Even though his eyes were hidden behind
dark glasses, I’d know he had winked at me, just before he
broke out into a smile. I was the only one who could make him
smile. He held so much trauma in his tall, muscular body. I knew
of some of it, but I sensed there was much more.

He never said anything to me— neve
asked me about my day or shared funny stories about his day
as we sped together through the streets. I don’t know why
my fantasy was able to seat me next to him, touch him even,
but kept him mute.

Many years later, after dealing with men who were not created
from paint, I’d curse my inability to design a more
complete fantasy for myself, wonder what it said about me
that my earliest dreams of desire were such bare, silent sketches.

Remembrance /Amber Wei

Ghost Towns and the Creative Imaginary: An Essay in Forms, Part IV  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 28

Alien love poem #1 / Yael Aldana

At a party in Dumbo under the Brooklyn bridge/ You with your long Maiblu barbie hair/ Your round I-smoke-pot-glasses/ It might not have been called Dumbo then/ maybe people just started calling it Dumbo/ You in your original 70s vintage shirt from Domseys/ the hippie slash rock and roll fantasy I didn’t know existed/ didn’t know I wanted./ talk to you for a few minutes/ hear your funny little chuckle.

I ask guys out/ I am known for being sexually aggressive/ but I’m not in the mood

nursing a breakup where I asked him out first/ not in the mood/

leave you standing there.

The party goes all night/ you, me, and your roommate the only ones left/ at dawn/ I’m on couch/ right foot tucked under myself./ waiting the morning light to go home on the subway

Your roommate asks me if I want to go/ go with you guys/ to breakfast or whatever/ I really didn’t talk to her/ barely noticed her/only noticed her because of you.

I didn’t figure out till years later/ you asked her to do it.

Raising Children When the World is on Fire / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

The world is on fire
but this house is not.

Some days I am the bucket
some days I am the water

being flung on the roof
to keep it all from burning down.

XXVIII / Kendra Brooks

Poetry is like
a lighthouse:
nondescript in daylight
hours, a tourist
attraction by the sea,
too many stairs,
narrow windows,
and in summer no ac.
But bring the darkness,
what’s more a storm,
and that’s when
a lighthouse likes 
to shine
and will perform
like a brilliant beacon,
a poem.

Joplin Documentary / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Imagine the ceaseless crash of a freight  
train wind. Imagine the vortex 
whirring you out of the car window. 

You’d tried to pleasure-drive the storm 
of a generation. What was the vision? 

It bore you like a clod, like a shard, the trees 
twisting scraps into shrapnel, unzipping 
your ribs. Imagine the miracle 

that landed you engineless in a field, 
sea of muck amid all the parts 

of everything that was. You emerged, 
heart beating into the part of the story 
no one knows to ask for— 

vampire mushroom spores that rooted 
through sewn-up wounds, the ground 

vengefully undoing all it could.  
Unlike some, you didn’t leave town. 
You’ve got kids now. Life goes on, 

multiplies, branches. It can’t be easy,  
that story on the body, the memory. 

For Worse or For Better, For Whatever It’s Worth / Yvette Perry

At almost 25 years the marriage had outlasted
the times of its birth. Where once there was a
bubble, filled with so many like minded others, now it was
just them. Had they held on for 15 or so years more,

the pendulum of lifestyle alternatives may have
swung back to meet them. But Reagan, two private schools,
a few moves, and one failed business had a gravitational pull
impossible to overcome. In the wake of the marriage,

four lives, each sectioned off, each alone. She’d remain that way
long after the others had found their way to new lives.
When it was her turn to build a family, she bowed to tradition,
vowed to impart mistakes only of her own making.

Here was a new bubble, with only the four of them.
Others wanted in, even if just to observe and learn—but they were
neither welcomed nor needed. She protected the boundaries
of the bubble with her entire being.

When her own 25-year mark came and went, she believed herself
to have done something of significant importance, she believed
she had vanquished a curse. For whatever it may be worth, she was
not exactly right. But also: she wasn’t exactly wrong.

Greater Bounds / Amber Wei

Fractured along indivisible boundary
and sight occluded by
not knowing when
the world suddenly opened
to the dreamer
wrought with the cave
and the cavern of stalactites
caving smaller

Time argues with
the moon
which withstands the ability
of walls to move
and arms outstretched
the earth feels its own limits
like it saw its own reflection
shocked by the avenue of growth
and budded it splinters
in two

Ghost Towns and the Creative Imaginary: An Essay in Forms, Part III  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 27

Grifter / Yael Aldana

I admired her, although it was me
in her sights
She saw what she wanted
she was coming
by any means necessary
she        will bend and push
and pull             and yield
and tweak                        to get her way.

You are just like her
the woman who gave birth to me
but is not my mother
she is just like you
not my mother
could not be my mother
not capable of being a mother
hates me
because she hates herself
hates me because
my adopted mother loved me
hates me because I love my adopted mother
who became my mother
a real mother
hates me because my adopted
mother became my mother
no longer adopted, just a mother
hates me because I didn’t crave her abuse
like sweet breath
hates me because I turned my back on her
bullshit without giving a shit
hates because my real mother died
and she is just some woman that never
gets tired of hurting me.

 you just like her
her just like you
her
you
Just like
Just alike.

Winding Stream Party / Catherine Bai

Just because it’s ancient doesn’t mean it’s not
difficult. Ask anyone who’s given birth
or been pregnant
or fucked
or just born, really.
That’s why everyone gets a drink at the end
whether they wrote a verse or not.
The cup of rice wine wiggles in and out of sight
but don’t worry.       It’s coming.

Communion / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I birthed him slick and wild as an otter,
riverine, black eyed and bound to no saviour
but undercurrents of thirst.

Our bright world of noise frightened him.
The first years he spent bound to my chest
with a length of knotted cloth, small fingers
tangled in the estuaries of my hair.

I whispered prayers without shapes
into the swirled shell of his ear.
I fed him all the milk this body
could bear.

Now you ask what he might become.
Outside, his laughter rises, like mist,
into the agile certainty of air.

We talk about our children as though
our hands hold back the river’s flow.
The truth is, no mother knows what will grow.

In my dreams, I went alone into the darkness
to find him, in the rift where everything
and nothing lives

We build a life on a bridge made from breath.
All is tide. All is waiting.
Time flicks its tail in the depths
between us, vast and silent.

Our children come to us
along submerged pathways of spirit.
Love is a sacred crossroad,
a place where many rivers flow

In the great river’s fractured light,
we are all different beasts come here to drink.
We were all led here by the same thirst.

XXVII / Kendra Brooks

Not another word. Promise.
Cuz when you hear onions
I’ve said tulips
And when you say
“You’re welcome!”
I’ve not felt grateful in the least.
Onions make you cry
and your beauty does the same to me.
“We’ll make it work,”
means it’s not working.
When you offer those words as encouragement,
it feels like enforcement.
Then when you say orange
I crave juice, cold and sweet, dripping from fruit
but you mean the color of a Robin’s beak
as it claims a juicy worm.
I promise. Not another word.

Monkey Business / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Ezra Klein said one day combustion engines will die
when people stop believing in them. In fact, we’ll
wonder how we ever lit those fires, why we blew up
the world with coal dust. Near dusk my husband
and I take the roadster for a topless ride. You can,
inhaling gas and the bake of asphalt, sense that
decadence. The leaching glow of the ombré sky
jewels the traffic lights. We slow to a ruby, race
the topaz. The thrill is in how fast we get to the limit,
the whirlwind in the engine fan, the boiling rumble
that takes up all the space for conversation.

At destination I order my usual—a souped up cone
of monkey business. I feel so American, licking
my banana-brownie ice cream in a parking lot
in the sticky heat of a second wave of summer.

It’s My Turn to Speak in the Circle / Yvette Perry

And I share about how
last night someone smashed
my back window, broke
into my car and stole my stereo,
Run-DMC’s Raising Hell
still in the cassette deck

Someone in the group asks,
How’d that make you feel
and I struggle to say
just how very, very angry
Why would someone
take from me, who had
so little to begin with?
Didn’t they see the broken
toothpicks in place of buttons?

All 20 around the circle nod,
several say they’re sad
this happened to me
We wrap up sharing and
I go to set out snacks

I turn round to see him
He presses something into my palm
It’s for you so no one
ever steals from you again

He runs off and I open my hand, see the
bright orange plastic snake, fresh
from a bubble gum machine capsule

I stand for several moments,
bowl of carrot sticks in one hand,
the snake in the other,
try my hardest not to cry
as I call 20 4-year-olds to
wash their hands for snack time

Gold Moon / Amber Wei

Were you left as a barley in the forest
not knowing which wilderness has captured the
ardor of imagination
that leaves forests lost
as a howling wolf
who has lost the sky

Sit senseless
on doubtful rock
of cemented nature
who knows no reprieve to weight
as carried by words
to the path that led us to become barley
as the seeds to life
giving birth to the woods
where wandering breaths of the forest
led us to become captivated in the leaves
that we mistaken
as home

Ghost Towns and the Creative Imaginary, Part 2  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 26

Slipping into Dolly / Yael Aldana

I slip into my Farrah Fawcett wig
looking more like Dolly
than Farrah.
Dolly has the right idea
hiding her tattoos and her men
slipping them beneath her skin-tight
snake-skin sequin
razzle dazzle.

slip into
silken armor
my I-can’t-breathe-corset
slip into
blue bejeweled close to heaven
high heels
slip into
triple thick
Razzmatazz.

slip past your predilections
you can’t see I’m a revolutionary
mothertrucker.
cause I’m all acrylic nails.
You miss my them/they them pronouns.
Cause I’m all over drawn red- orange lips.

slip into your propensities.
and you let me.
Because I look like a girl
from Tennessee
who needs a beer.

Cooking / Catherine Bai

how do you explain the grammar of love
to someone born without a tongue
a couple makes out wetly on the sidewalk
one reminds the other to get turmeric

the flavor won’t come through without it

Before I Lose Myself / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I turn off the light
and let the other self in.

She folds herself into me
Spine notches into spine,

ribs pass through each other
like joinery. Her heartbeat

chases mine like a fever,
like the sound of something

slowly being broken,
pressed down against

itself till it cannot hold.
She is who I might have become

if I was not afraid of being alone.
Here in this dark room, I am both of us.

XXVI / Kendra Brooks

Our GracieLu resides inside my chest, 
she landed there on her way to rest. 
My heart beats slower on rainy days, 
and flutters gaily when it’s time to play. 
I’m sure she gave me her last word 
but when I speak it it feels absurd. 

On the porch just after dusk that night
Mel, the mobile vet came & shaved her leg,
then injected her with a deathly dose.
The big Buck moon was shining high
as she breathed in one last time, 
then flew out on flight devine.

I ducked, I quaked, I tried to dodge
as her spirit flew right into me.
Two weeks she’s stayed, and won’t dislodge.
Both GracieLu’s soul and her final pain
have settled softly into my domain. 
Most say it is impossible –a lark, 
but ever since her passing when I wake, 
I find I have the most incredible urge to bark.

star-pulse  / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

star-pulse . . . 

the cicadas 

fire drill 

Hometown / Yvette Perry

I wish I had a home, a ‘hood, a from
When roaming, meeting others when they’d ask
And where did you grow up, I’d not be dumb
I would not struggle with this basic task
Right off I’d name a city and a block,
a school where I attended all the years
I’d have from there a crew, some mates, a flock,
home girls who shared my victories and tears 
Instead of one hometown I have a list
street names for years or just a month—one where
I had pet fish, another my first kiss,
and there the playground where I learned to swear
I do not have one from, I have a sea
with waves of my become and memory

Hinges / Amber Wei

Find words that made
imaginative illusory whisper
the agony of its day
prioritization clouded by mist
of contractual obligation
unchanging to bemuse
what was altogether
frankly openness
mouth aghast
as we speak in wonder

Who is to know that the
audacious are incoherently
unstable
riddled with thoughts of peace
transience absolved

Why was the door opening
only to leave parts of the hinges
behind
opening again an impossibility
of conception
and it became an unruly
conquest
a game to yield joy as a bonus
smiling until the corners of the mouth
inched above

Ghost Towns & the Creative Imaginary  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 25

Rejected Zip Ode / Yael Aldana

3) it’s if the

3) white hot heat

0)

6) never ends. Recycles and then returns

2) morning anew.

So you wanna be a poet / Catherine Bai

the first step 
is to make it beautiful
not the poem, I mean
but your life

how do you make your life beautiful?

1. put a treat on top of the garbage bins at Christmas, so the raccoons that come nightly can have a feast

2. catalogue every shade of green that brings delight

3. give away your last bit of cash

4. make a campfire at night and kiss someone with your eyes closed

5. learn your mother’s language

6. learn an instrument and play it badly to an audience of loved ones; make a grand bow to their raucous applause at the end

7. take someone to the movies and take their hand when the main characters start to fall in love

8. eat a peach in the summertime

9. swim in the ocean, then let the sun dry off every last bead of saltwater

10. talk to children

11. make ten paintings and destroy nine of them… then destroy the tenth

12. treat the world as your life partner, meaning: don’t abandon her

Writing Poems While Boats Explode / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

It is September and
I am writing poems while boats explode
in the eyeless sea. Fear is a fault line
beneath the hot street. Somewhere
on the internet, a god with salt on his tongue
is drawing lots, deciding who will sink
and who will burn. The sea opens and closes
its vast white eye, blinking bodies
out like splinters.

XXV / Kendra Brooks

In the way you anticipate eating chocolate
you cannot have no memory of sweetness
or ignore anticipation and forget
past satisfaction.
But if you could try!!
Try to let each new taste be new;
Bite into uncharted territory
Maybe close your eyes to wipe clean 
the memory of your first sunrise, first kiss
And not return to the familiar
expectations of golden explosions.
Instead invite an introduction to darkness 
imagine yourself in the depths of a cave
Let your lungs expand in utter darkness 
like a flock of morning birds
flapping their wet wings, rising in sound
startled by the first gust of morning air.
If you could let your heart feel the weight 
of the possibility of something unknown,
and unmistakably beyond desire.
If you you could pretend that you never knew 
pleasure or even the glory of confections, 
the taste of sweetness, the satisfaction of delight
so that when it comes it could be a new
discovery all over again, would you?

Bank / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

What does it hold, 
the sky’s old gray  
belly, other than its store 
of stems and violence? Some 
thing rides toward us—mount, 
mountain, mounting. Grumble 
of Huns, their cavalry speed hard 
to perceive. The backwards of when 
in an airplane, caught in the warp of up. 
Gravity, they say mucks with time—the farther 
from core, the faster matters pass the temporal plane. 
That’s why the satellites tick thinner minutes. 
How quick I know you grow
the increased distance. 

This Poem Is a Zine / Yvette Perry

There’s no “I” in poem
The Masters decided long ago
what rules there’d be like where to
break the lines, 
what words should rhyme.
They detached feet designed for dancing
and made them into
mathematical formulae, attached prefixes
like penta- and hexa- making
mockery of beating hearts
There is no room for me here

There is an “I” in zine
I make and 
break rules as I please
I transform blank paper to possibilities
I type, I write, I paint, I draw, I glue 
I cut a slit 
partly down the paper’s center, 
fold several times this way and that, 
make a little booklet that I give to you 
This zine is so full of I
and like I, imperfect—
yet still can dance 

Refracted / Amber Wei

So tell me when you have mercy
and the night is an oblong hue
and the shade no longer covers
what warm unspoken sadness
exists where shapes have no figure
only to be called unidirectional
so what is misfigured
is rather scattered
and I yearn for you to hold the
prism of light
to allow all sadness to enter
to allow the nighttime to exit as blue

The Two Ladies of Provence, Part III  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 24

Absence / Presence / Yael Aldana

The truth is that we are never touching
anything. There are always atoms
vibrating in between
fingers and fur
elbows and couch
shoe and foot.
Nothing is solid, only vibrating
Closer or farther.
My brain doesn’t know this
as I touch the small black
paw of a smaller than usual
cat that used live  beneath
my shed.
Where does the sensation
come from of impossible
softness? She doesn’t know
as she lays against me. She
doesn’t know that this warm
feeling of her tiny body against
my arm are atoms shimming
this was rather than that way.
I don’t know this either as I kiss
her small head and she doesn’t
move, stays stock still, fur all
shiny velvet, just the trick
of light at the back of my eyes
reversed.

I make my best attempts in the dark / Catherine Bai

my hands surprise me like a wolf
my mother told me about

a man swivelled his head
and got his throat torn out

when you walk down a road at night
keep your gaze on the ground

someone taps you on the shoulder
check for fur, check for claws

Drawing a Circle on the Eve of a New Year / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I was born on the eve of a hurricane
with the ocean in my skull,
seawater trapped between brain
and bone. I was born soundless
and unwilling, a wave breaking
over my mother’s body, born
into a house always shuttered
against some unnamed storm.
Now, on the eve of my birthday,
I am drawing a circle.
I wrap myself in a bird’s thin wing,
drink milk fat with unspent rage,
curl into a whorled shell, a question,
crest of a breaking wave.
I have always been moving
from one place to another.
See? Listen to my heartbeat.
I am still running, running
trying to find my way home,
beating down locked doors,
knocking on broken windows.
See my hands? I am folding
the years into paper boats,
tying words together like rafts
with graying thread spun
from the feathers of seabirds,
one letter tied to the next until
every last word has been said.

Balut / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I soft-boiled  
eggs this morning,  
sat them in cups, cracked  
the tops, and daydreamed 
they were balut. Oh the fruit  
of a body, that rich soup made  
stirring an unborn, amniotic  
duck. Everything you touch  
so soft—no hard beak, no  
peaked feathers, sun of  
yolk in its tethers. 
I dream of it 
forever. 

Humble Bragging (after Nikki Giovanni) / Yvette Perry

I was born in the fall of the first dawn.
I taught teens to sit quietly, calmly
as milk and sugar were poured on their heads
and sputum flung at their faces and feet.
I spun Sunday-best three-piece suits and white
cotton dresses from DNA of seals,
then garbed my parents and children in them.
No fire hose water will pierce their skin.
I sat beside Martin in the jail cell,
slipped through the bars, the words he’d written sewn
into the lining of both of my lungs:
…moral means can’t save immoral ends… The
world heard. I can’t fly like birds in the sky,
but I am resourceful, I’ve learned to glide.

Return Trip is Necessary / Amber Wei

I wondered if humanity was ready to see the
open wound who on the heart was
a coal-fired muse

the tear talker anguish within
concealed by the setting sun doubly hidden
by the midnight gleam

Cry on me yet my clothes don’t abide by
earthly rules
they are tainted by grief grown twice
while I let the flowers bleed

Until they dried the atoms who recede
atomic being larger than the trees
that drought

Dry reality causal
unto the point where desperation riddled
by the voices become
utmost bear

In anguish my hands hold
the home of the world
because the pieces are larger than
the soul that tried to complete the puzzle

Erosion beat upon dust
that larger became the mountainous terrain
which deer tried to climb
only to teach the audacious traveler
that twice up the path
was not enough to teach him
how to come down,
returning to the path from which it started

The Two Ladies of Provence, Part II  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 23

Some words = Roman Catholic / Yael Aldana

Mantle in blue
Palms outstretched
Ave
Ave Maria
Blood on the feet
Hands clasped
Silver Rosary beads
Blood on the cross
The Wafer
Hands beckoning
Hands cradling the heart
The heart
Wine
the sacred heart
Blood
Fire
Blood

I made a painting once of a girl whose heart was outside
her chest, pierced with arrows, with Alizarin Crimson blood.
My art teacher asked
Are you Roman Catholic?
I said,
Yes.

A child is just your grief in slow motion / Catherine Bai

A kid passes in front of me, holding hands with his mom
then runs back alone, just to blow a kiss
to his friend. It is so sweet, 
I want to put it in my mouth like a peach pit
the taste makes me think of fireflies 
we used to catch and release
on summer nights after making out
and touching our private parts
like the back of your earlobe, the bottom lashes of my eye
which bend like siblings in mournful prayer.

It’s obscene
the way you caress my kidneys
our baby will squish every organ in my body
and it won’t be tender
Still, their little fingers will snatch every kiss we’ve flown
into the ether, place them in a gentle heap
like so many offerings
sweetly rotting at the altar.

Tomorrow / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

In the year of flood
and slow-growing vine

in the hour of frogsong
and giant snail,

in the owl shriek
gathering cloud

and sudden dark
in the rustle of bois cano

and sweep of batwing
tomorrow seeps in

through cracked louvre
and crumbling brick

all the things we didn’t think
would happen in our time

in this year, still
wide open, still drifting

like algae, thick as silence
tomorrow, smelling of iron

waiting in trees
beyond the window

branches cracking beneath
unseen weight of time

i am prompt / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

to the door.       yes 
every morning.      see my feet? 
see me unsheathe?     i know      u 
like the beans.     i like 
ur breathing.              slow. 
deep.     i    know   when you stop 
sleep.     see?   i     wait 
to speak.   u taught me    speak 
remember?    i member 
when u used to    leave 
the door       ajar.     i liked 
ur wiggling.      the dark.      so neat. 
wish i could repeat. 
ready for that treat.           please 
I could be so good      if    u 
just         yes       let 
the      door 

Corn / Yvette Perry

I’m going through the checklist with her (Medicare card, prescription list…), ask
if she wants to take a jacket, it’s not supposed to warm up until the afternoon.
Picking out shoes takes longer than I’d imagined: these ones make her feet hurt, 
and these (that we bought her last Christmas) are too heavy…make her feel 
like she’ll trip, this pair won’t match the pocketbook she plans to take.

I put the walker in the back and help buckle her in the seat.
I slow down a block away for yellow lights and take right turns with my foot on the brakes. 
We pass a corner where an automatic car wash used to be Red Lobster, and a football field 
expanse of concrete, weeds sprouting from jagged open scars, that used to be Sears.
She has a memory for each corner and lot, the only thing keeping their former selves alive.
She sees a mint green Caddie and is reminded of the car she and her husband and their 
friends from Ft. Lewis drove to Las Vegas. The car broke down an hour away from the strip. 

We pull up, the valet attendant greets her by name, compliments her outfit.
Inside the lobby the registration clerk asks how her grandchildren are doing in college.
Once in the room, the nurse she likes calls her by her first name. 
She doesn’t flinch as she usually does.
The doctor comes in and cradles her left foot, then uses a scalpel to gently scrape the hardened center of a penny sized skin deposit on the pad of her
big toe.
We’re headed back to the lobby exactly three minutes and 22 seconds later. 
I’m buckling her back in the car about 10 minutes after that.

Twenty-eight minutes later, we are pulling into the garage.
As I’m guiding her from the front seat, I think I hear it whispered softly, but I’m not sure.
I head to the trunk to get the walker out as she makes her way inside the house.
Yes, I decide. I definitely heard it: thank you.

Deer / Amber Wei

Was there breath on my shoulder
when you entered
for he was already there
when the starlight cast a gleam on his shadow
only to find that he was a meandering hare
So hop and scamper away
to the place where nobody can find
so that flashlights can only find brush in a forest
and the moonlight’s gleam only meets dust
there is irrevocable honor
in presence
and somehow, my gaze
meets that of yours
to tell the shadows to stop moving
So I can capture a glimpse of the future that is ours

 
Deadvlei – Conclusion / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 22

When I am 72 / Yael Aldana

I would go to the beach in my gold string bikini
My breasts slung slack in golden triangular
hammocks
I wonder who would police me?
You?
I would carry my fawn-colored Pekinese
Trained to nip at people if they get to close
I would go to hot yoga in my daughter’s used
Lululemons, that she would beg me to throw
away, that I would darn and repair when they
fray open at the seams. I would say, they
are still good. I would drive my blue Prius V
my back curved around the steering wheel
like a C. I would go to the Trader Joe’s
and ask for the star fruit they had last month,
squeeze the avocados too much, ask my
favorite employee about the star fruit.
I would call him Joe, not noticing his
name tag says James. I would drive home
fast in my blue Prius V, letting all
who want to, cut me off in traffic.

Centos are strange and difficult / Catherine Bai

I looked beneath my fingernails and found it there
magnificent pubes
the baby alligators behind our snaking road
I threw up in their mouths and they swallowed
I do whatever the light tells me to
oh how dark
his strange, mysterious babble
it’s like a spiral—we never get any closer
the long and short of our fiction

god of small beasts / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

occupy me                 like an anthill’s belly             take the broken bread

crumbling altar           ruined house              of my body

enter this room           twice cracked             earth poured    mended with need     

god of mortar              among             the overlooked things                                    find me

I have flown                            backward       through this door                   so many times

I have grown                           wordless and full                   

I have been enough.

rain, come                   let water quicken                    down the quiet paths

and                  make me clay                         make me paper           make me something

that remembers          

                                                            make me something new

for I am heavy                                    I have forgotten so much

I move blindly            toward the gasp                                 of blood and sugar

find me                        one lost                                   among             a hundred wings

God find me                                        for I am a swarm

XXII / Kendra Brooks

A late summer bloom taunts the bees
while restless birch bark sheds and peels, 
and silvery stones shine up into dusk.
Garden birds hide down by the pond, 
perched snuggly, their fears squeak in shriller tones
from the highest branches of the moulting trees.
But their warning is no more than a protest.
October advances and the moon kneels down.
Toppling corn fields bow. Overripe apples drop.
The clock’s hands turn back but do not stop.
And soon enough November will claim its time. 
Word is sent by clever crows; daylight shrinks, 
And the early night grows. Winter stands waiting 
at the end of the path as the race of the seasons 
stumbles past, soon December will take the lead
blasting its wrath into a glaring sunrise 
reflected on the frost of the leaning grass.

Stupid Human Tricks / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Each year we had to come up with something 
for bonfire night at the annual missionary kids’ 
camp. Luckily, most of what I can do is strange— 
walk on stilts, burp on command, pop my shoulder 
socket. I can, without practice, arch into a backbend.  
Last year a class of students didn’t believe me, so  
I showed them. I’m weirdly good at cracking finger joints— 
can usually hit forty with odd twists of the phalanges. 
I know nearly a dozen patterns for balloon animals, 
can inflate some large-diameter bubblegum. I’m good  
at tolerating inhuman levels of capsaicin. I can recite  
all U.S. presidents, states, and English prepositions 
to the tunes of various songs. I’ve also memorized 
some fifty verses of the book of John, all of Psalm 91. 
I punish my opponents in mini golf and foosball. 
There was something healing, those nights, parading 
our surprises in the firelight. I think about us scattered 
across countries and continents, flexing these strange 
talents, finding random ways of making sense. 

Throw Rug Dinosaur / Yvette Perry

“A question trembles in the silence: why did this remarkable thing happen to this perfectly ordinary man? It may not matter why the world shifted so drastically for him. Existence is slippery at the best of times… He’s one of us: a man determined to prevail in the world that was and the world that is—or the world that will be.”

~“Wordplay,” The Twilight Zone, 1985

My table lamping of the situation has shifted:
It’s not everyone else; it’s me.
I have moved through 
time, 
but not in the same timeyarn as the rest of
the pomegranate.
I sit at my sky and eat my dinosaur, 
one ankle listening to a podcast with words I do not table lamp,
and the other ankle to my colleagues who are laughing, in on a 
private spoon that may be about me 
or about some engine else entirely.
I cannot know.

When did I first notice the shift?
It was little engines at first—
a common word just out of my moonlight, on the tip of my spear;
new internet butter that I had to Wiggle or ask my trees what it meant…
Engines like that.
But it has gotten worse. 

 Tomorrow will be the five-year throw rug of your leaving.
We won’t grow old together, like we’d expanded.
                                    I don’t have you

                                                      to help me table lamp a pomegranate that 
                                                                        considers me already disappeared.

Regress / Amber Wei

Why were you speedily walking?
Were you trying to get somewhere?
or was the destination itself quickened by your pace
So that it seemed like the earth inched a bit further
and left some footsteps behind
But really, you are not moving
and everything is gaining together,
speed
so that one minute becomes an hour
and one moment,
an eternity
I am losing time
but time is losing hours
so we move ahead
only to come back to
exactly from which we came

 استمع إلى غنائها  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

Hops, light-winged across the rubble.
I hear her chirp—she skips and smiles:
Al Jazeera plays her voice
un-smothered by dust— the girl, now Insta-
grammed. Each burst of song is water
underground. Unstoppable
semitic drift—her glottal stops
take root in change, will root the rubble.
Hear her chirp—if words could water
hope—at the refugee camp, she smiles
like one who counts her blessings in Insta-
breaths of dirge or prayer. And if voice
where purged of fear, hers would be voice
as chirrup, warble, unstoppable
across the feathered space, now Insta-
grammed to drown the thud of rubble—
Hear her speak—she sings and smiles
each verb a pebble skimming the water. […]

September - Poem 21

Waiting / Yael Aldana

Hands intertwined behind the back, waiting,
Egg white pleated skirt dusting your knees, waiting,
Looking slightly bow-legged in brown flat shoes, waiting,
Scarlet red ring around your sweater at your wrists, waiting,
Sitting in a scarlet couch at the mall, waiting,
Dressed head to toe in pink, waiting,
Standing behind the woman in the lilac hat, waiting,
Standing with a fake red hibiscus in your hair, waiting,
Standing with your pen poised, the waitress, waiting,
Sitting on the gym floor, eleven years old, in green shorts, waiting,
Sitting by the white bed, hospital monitors humming, waiting
for your life to slip past me out the door, waiting.

Your body knows things you never could / Catherine Bai

Not everything needs to be seen
by the love of your life
just because they want to kiss you
doesn’t mean they want to squint into your uterine lining
and look for that one fragile, fading 
memory. You know the one—
I didn’t say you couldn’t show them everything
you would never say aloud to your mother
who would’ve loved you anyway, except
you couldn’t be that good, ever.
Yeah, I said it
’cause I’m that way too
the leaking yawn of your mouth 
looks so stupid now
but it was celestial, when you couldn’t imagine learning
that one day everyone you know will die
and so will everyone you didn’t know
who died anyway.
Picture the pomegranate tree 
in my neighbor’s front yard
they’re not red but green, but I bet you thought of the fruit
ripe and heaving, with scars on the skin
that someone made when the branch was still an embryo
the dark traffic swimming
in the pale, boney pip.

Returning Ashes / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

Touch this blade. This leaf.
This water. Cleanse yourself of
the dust and smoke I leave behind.
I return home in the ash-gray
footprints of mourning children,
of wives past and present who never
speak to each other except to pray.
I return in the dark spaces between
this year and seven decades gone,
each memory a thinning space
between splayed fingers on
a child’s scalp. Anoint yourself
before you enter my house for the last time,
once for the child you carry,
the one I will never meet, and again
so that you might forgive me.

XX:  / Kendra Brooks

Tr
ee
ss
tanding still,
tell.
ing
ea
ch other
how
it’s done.
In slant rhyme,
end rhyme,
and inky couplets
scrawled on
The
ir
pap
er so
uls

White Coat Syndrome / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I’ve always had it—dragged through the dark 
halls of hospitals after hours, the behind-the-scenes 
treatment of growing up in a doctor’s family. Back 
then when it was time for shots, I’d bite Dad’s arm 
and run away. The only fun was x-rays, calming 
lead bib, the inside-out shadow world of bones  
and cartilage. I behave somewhat better now  
that my doc isn’t my parent, that it’s someone 
who changes every few years, switches clinics.  
My brain thinks I’m being enormously brave— 
voluntary boosters and well-womans. No pens 
in the top pocket, he taps a tablet, gets our visits  
over quickly, updates the medical portal, re-ups my  
birth control, weighs my risks, my milage in basic  
questions and measurements. I find most times 
I’ve hardly been touched. So why does the pressure 
always go up—so much that now I have to check 
at home, upload the results of the pinching cuff. 
I don’t know why, but I wish he knew I liked poetry, 
that the right questions might get a family history. 

Peace (Be Not Still) / Yvette Perry

People, a tempest is raging—
Tempest of would-be despots and 
tumult of their clattering kind
They’ve convinced you it’s good to
stay sleeping
Can you see?
The universe is agnostic, not moral, and 
if there is an arc it surely will break
before it bends
Justice will be the fairy tale you tell your 
grandchildren when you tuck them
under their comforters at night
Are you dozing?
You sing of the stillness of peace,
but peace is not tranquil
A strong peace is forever agitating
A lasting peace is not the default,
and takes harmonized hands and feet
to achieve and to maintain 
A true peace can be as wrathful as the
winds and waves that seek to destroy it
Are we ready?

(21 September is the International Day of Peace. The 2025 theme is Act Now for a Peaceful World)

Brighter Lights / Amber Wei

You were stronger when the earth was
circular and brighter than the sun
who called my name

Yet the daylight burns bright
the treasure, that lost is the secret garden
blooms is the soul that keeps

Find that the earth changes
but not its revolution on the axis of tilt

Deepen it inside me
and forget that it was lost
once
for pastures to bloom in the wilderness of
evermore      

Deadvlei, Part 9  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 20

Waiting to be Waylaid / Yael Aldana

Although,
I am a good waylayer
My intentions
are straight
true
I wait to be waylaid
But might do the waylaying
One or two
do the waylaying
physically capable?
emotionally.
capable?
Maybe
Who knows?
Emotional
Questionable
physically
Perhaps
Who is waylaid
and waylaying?

I stand still and nothing happens / Catherine Bai

I plan my friendships two years in advance
I want a painter to move into the casita next door
and teach me how to look for beetles
I write my best lines while rubbing my pussy
sometimes I don’t do it with my hand
I just imagine I am
and then I come
into my own, which means absolutely nothing
I want to flirt with Trotsky like Frida did
and then they probably fucked
because she was so beautiful
I scoop up spiders in my hands
and put them in sleepy corners of the house
like the dry part of my kitchen sink
and the empty flower pot
all I want in life is to find somewhere to put all this pain
and pleasure
it’s worth having every gorgeous tryst you can
no matter how calamitous
I don’t want to die with my feet in your hands
I want them to scrunch up and turn into lotuses
that wilt in a resplendent, muddy river

Mater Dolorosa / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I am a monastery with all the lights on.

Turn off the lights. I reappear before yo
limping, feral and brave.

The clock ticks, shades go down.
I return to you much older than before.

I am the charred side of the mountain.

Close the door behind you, I will wait.
I will line my eyes and paint my lips
like an offering, shard of smashed window
glory that was.

I am an empty church.

You used to come here to pray
now you barely recognize me.

(I have been through the night, I understand.)

Set me down here, I will spin you a fine web.
I am a necklace of small moons, a pyre
learning to burn alone.

I will burn for you. Set me down here,
I will ask no questions.

XX: / Kendra Brooks

September
Is starting to float away
Like soapy bubble
Rising out over 
The incoming tide
On a last chance to hit the beach
Before October
Stumbles up behind us
And obliterates summer
With its wooden club
Of early darkness

One Art / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I was visiting my grandmother, 
a delicious summer back in Chiang Mai. 
I’d always liked playing tourist at the night bazaar, 
amusing locals with my white face and language  
skills, haggling for discount souvenirs to take to friends  
in the States. One place painted clay into the tiniest fruit 
baskets. Another stall had little ridged-back frogs 
the drag of a stick would make ribbit. You could sit 
for caricatures or charcoal portraits, buy a heap  
of toasted crickets in crackling snaps of kaffir leaf, 
let tanks of minnows nibble callouses off your feet.
I thought I’d seen it all before, but there was a cart 
of new art—bits of buffalo leather molded 
into rose-shaped rings. I wanted one dearly. 
The sellers, of course, can tell—a carelessly long  
stare and I was done for. Still, she and I argued 
back-and-forth. I pressed, demanded calculations,  
add-ins, threatened, classically, to walk. 
She didn’t give in to my party-trick talk, saw 
my nana loaded with bags of other purchases—spun   
string lights, foldable lanterns, pinned moths. 
She wouldn’t budge, hit me with “Look at yourself; 
what is it to you, fifty baht?” It was rude, but true. 
The sting of her attitude. The way she got me to buy two. 

UnPuzzled / Yvette Perry

1.

I am no longer
accepting false fit. This time:
perfect match only.

2.

Strategy: start with
edges and corners. But my
center’s still empty.

3. 

I found a piece that had 
fallen to the floor, missing for
years…decades, even.

4. 

This is not child’s play.
I don’t have much time left to
find missing pieces.

5.

Once put together
will I look at all like the 
picture on my box?

Flew / Amber Wei

The eastern tiger swallowtail blew the
wind away
freedom longing for a
brighter breeze
among the summer
it wandered
until grass met the trees
the leaves without dew
from the night
the swallowtail drifted away
until pleasure became
the vicissitudes of life
and why was it so free
to become camouflaged
among green
when the black swallowtail came,
it changed season itself
as it found grass to be
hidden among rocks
and suddenly it approached
the creek
and it was summer, again

Deadvlei, Part 8  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 19

A Small life / Yael Aldana

Didn’t my mother live a small life?
wasn’t she just a housewife? Even
after She divorced the husband?
Besides, she’s wasn’t even my real
mother.
You spell out
ADOPTED
so I understand
a fake mother
but we looked like each other
both brown skinned and hawk-eyed.
you never saw her sweep into a room,
with her Alfred Dunner dress
both haughty and humble.
you too would fall
charmed.
you too would run up to her
ask, Ms Clarke would
some petite fours?
watch her not screw up her face
because they were bland and dry.

she was all I knew, her soft cheek
her long black hair,
until there was another mother.
who didn’t matter because she
wasn’t there.
you wouldn’t see her take off
the Alfred Dunner dress and lay it
just so, to air for twelve hours.
You wouldn’t hear her ask me to bring
her the leftover chicken wings because
she was starving. you wouldn’t hear her
say that the food was terrible, but the
people were nice, and if asked she would
go again.

The Nightmare / Catherine Bai

My father dreamt that he was bearing me 
on his back, up a steep hill that flattened 
only after waking. He said it wasn’t a nightmare, exactly,
but it was for me. I wanted to understand 
how he could find it in him to carry 
two hundred pounds, when we were both weary 
and asleep. 

As he spoke, I could feel his phantom 
sweat, the tremulous
ache of his shoulders, 
the burning calves. 
What I couldn’t imagine
was why he had carried me at all
the thick dangers lurking 
at the bottom, the certain threats to my life.
It’s no wonder most dreams begin
in the middle—
the question of why irrelevant,
incidental
when you consider the whole plot of the thing
the long and short of our fiction, it’s easy to see
it’s only love 
that makes the tale complete.

Toco / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

Objects lost at sea do not come right back to shore.
It turns out, dry land has a weak hold on us after all
in spite of our feet and lungs. The secret life
of sunken things must unravel like blue thread
a ribbon of current, a sonar spiral, spooling round
and round till it is finished.

XIX: Villanelle / Kendra Brooks

Trees are line dancing down by the lake
Ash, elm, birches and maple, especially the pines
Branches bend gently as they shimmy and shake

The wind is rising, the leaves are wide awake
It’s late autumn, colors are changing their color design
As the trees are line dancing down by the lake

Abscission is stirring, the trees know what’s at stake
The changing wind is a warning it’s a new season in time
The branches bending gently as they shimmy and shake

Nests stand empty, birds have flown to follow their fate
Ash, elm, birches, maples, and pines all moving in kind
The trees are line dancing down by the lake

Soon leaf, fruit, and flower, the trees will forsake 
Petioles hold strong in the wind, but the trees can’t deny
their branches bending gently as they shimmy and shake

The winds of change ask, and the trees make no mistake
There are decisions to be made we all know the signs
As the trees continue line dancing down by the lake
Their branches bending gently as they shimmy and shake

Redolence  / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Sans skunk hours 
    the neighborhood 
         can smell so good: 
         stony concrete bake, 
    the sprinklers’ arcs 
of petrichor, heady 
thread of charcoal. 
    I’m always listing 
         toward the garlic 
         of a certain street. 
    Bless that pestle, 
the seared steel pan  
nestling its smoke. 
    I take a slow-poke 
         pace around the lake, 
         loamy, dank, and homey. 

Confrontational Clichés / Yvette Perry

They say there’s no fury hotter than what Hell hath.
I say: Hold my gin and tonic. 

Watch while I write a sternly worded, half-star review.
Listen to the rant I’ll post that’ll receive 2.3K likes in its first four days.
Feel the daggers I shoot into your sternum from my pointed finger.
This isn’t my first rodeo: 
I have God and both local police and 
the manager on speed dial.
I am not to be trifled with.

Why yes, actually, I do have time today.
I tried to ask you nicely: I don’t recognize 
you/your car/your kid/your dog.
You are trespassing in this neighborhood.
And, no. My name’s not Karen and I
don’t care to tell you what is.
I am a Taxpayer and a Citizen, 
is all you need to know.

Oh, there you go, 
playing the race card.
My Irish ancestors were slaves, too. 
I did the 33 and me.
And one of my best friends from yoga class
is an African American woman.
I don’t see color. 
I’m deeply offended and hurt.

Watch while I begin to weep.
My flowing tears are louder than an atomic bomb
and twice as deadly.
Their salty sweetness will bend on-lookers to my will
and leave you without a leg to stand on.

You say karma’s gonna get me?
I say: Karma has bit off more than she can chew 
if she tries to mess with me.

Learner / Amber Wei

Education is the means upon which I breathe
then why is it that I haven’t learned anything
Are we adept in the experiences that scream life?
teach me more
until hunger becomes a weakened body
that feeling of insatiable pursuits
I lie flat in a 2D plane
because the third dimension wandered
and stood still
while life climbed higher
when the roots were broken
because the soil that gave me life by mind
disappointed life by living
that each day was too much a breath
to know that education was learning
concealed to know that a milestone is
unraveled not knowing where your footsteps once tread

Deadvlei, Part 7  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 18

Love’s Lonely Auspices / Yael Aldanas

I picture my mother in heaven, about to sip a from a tiny cup of tea with a raspberry floating. She has an appointment to wander through a field of Christmas candles later, gossip with her friends over tepid coffee. I wonder how she reacts when I sent the message, I need you, please help. I don’t call on her often, only when I really need her. I assume she is busy. I wonder if she sighs, puts her tea aside with a clatter. I wonder if she can be there and with me at the same time, if she waves her spirit arms to clear scales from my eyes, so I can see what is in front of me. I wonder if she whispers my name with golden angel breath to someone who can help. I know that before she leaves to her field of flowers she stops and watches her grandson sleeping, the boy with her face, with the one curl in the middle of his head. I know she tells him he’s the king of all he sees, that he is not a boy but The Boy, her boy, before she returns to her field of flowers.

Where are you really from? / Catherine Bai

You asked me where I was from
and I pointed at the moon and made bunny ears
You asked again, no, where are you really from
and I said I already told you! but maybe you'd believe me
if you turned into that little black garden snake 
hissing by your ankle
and made friends with a turtle by the lake
You shook your head and said I'm talking about your nationality
and I said I already told you twice! and I told him again
in the dialect of my father's village
in the language my mother learned
in the other language her father spoke,
when he was abandoned in the south 
and raised by wolves, who never told him where they heard 
his strange, mysterious babble

You see, I'm Polish, he said, his patience
startling and clear. I would never do this out loud
but I smiled—
my tender, pitying heart
my tangled roots, the creeping rhizomes
I didn't want to be crude
and point at his mother's vagina
One day you'll return to the soil and realize
oh how dark
what a mess
Where am I from? I asked, desperate

            the earth never says

Ortoire/ Nariva / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

My mother will not leave
the parked car, not even to stand
at the sea wall’s edge. Dark water groans
against worn rock. It calls out to her,
she says. Deep water always has.
I lean out the window, face in the wind.
To me, the waves say nothing.
People ask “You live on an island.
Why you can’t swim?”
See, communion with the tide
is a difficult science. All the bodies
in the heavens will have their turn
pulling the nets
and the course never stays
the same: mad Atlantic
two blind rivers,
ground gives way again and again.

Ortoire/ Nariva / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

My mother will not leave
the parked car, not even to stand
at the sea wall’s edge. Dark water groans
against worn rock. It calls out to her,
she says. Deep water always has.
I lean out the window, face in the wind.
To me, the waves say nothing.

People ask “You live on an island.
Why you can’t swim?”

See, communion with the tide
is a difficult science. All the bodies
in the heavens will have their turn
pulling the nets
and the course never stays
the same: mad Atlantic
two blind rivers,
ground gives way again and again.

Parable of the Pallets / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I’ve been told fruit at chain stores is bought 
from large farm batches strapped to pallets, 
that it’s someone’s job to check for quality. 
I imagine a quick stab and slice by pocketknife,  
a taste-tester’s chin dripping at the sale. 

Chances are, oranges from a single crate made 
it here from the same orchard, but when I pry 
the white interstices of four sibling orbs,  
flay and impale their little cubicle meats, 

each one is entirely unique. One is sour as sin, 
half-turned to ferment. Another, fibers stiff 
as a grapefruit or pomelo. Next, the bitterest. 

I palm the last, caress its pores. No one knows 
where home is anymore.

Bomb Fragments / Yvette Perry

I need to tell you
something I just remembered 
I know it’s late

(or rather, it’s early)
There’s a picture, remember,
of us together

You were six, seven,
your sister was a toddler
I think it was spring—

April? Had to be
It would have been afternoon
I remember the

low bent of the sun
In the picture, you’re squinting,
wearing a green dress

We had driven down
that morning, six-hour trip, 
left at four AM

(I remember that
part specifically) and 
you were excited

that you got to ride 
in the car in your PJs
with Winnie the Pooh

You slept the whole way
Your grandfather was driving,
me, you, your sister

were in the back seat,
your grandmother in the front,
our bags in the trunk

It was just us five
And that’s what I had to tell
you: it was just us

Years ago, you asked 
me and I said Daddy was
taking the picture

But no, wouldn’t have 
been enough room in the car
Daddy wasn’t there

We got a nice man
who we’d met standing in line
to take our picture

Daddy wasn’t there,
stayed home, had to work (or, so 
he claimed at the time)

Anyway, I just
remembered about that and 
needed to tell you

Give me a call back
when you wake up and get this
message, love you, bye

Combustible / Amber Wei

An explosion of feeling
tempered by madness of regret
transitory suggestions,
neglected
for hands hold no arduous
personality to be soiled, by
perception
And instead, there is rust in the
breaks that find pedals
moving to become immobile
And suddenly we stop
Halted by the ability to halt,
itself

And we stop knowing we can
when the explosion of feeling
never cared

picking plums in her orchard / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 17

Fulcrum / Yael Aldana

A forward sway, a retraction
a teetering, over before almost,
at line opposite of before
a fulcrum
I tact the round cheek of a girl
in the oval of my mind, the fine
curve of the cheek to lip, like
fine sand stopped in an hour
glass, to pool in my mind’s
open bowl.

I wept / Catherine Bai

I-wept

Vervine Tea / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

You were expecting something beautiful,
forgetting how easily small flowers bruise.
It’s true, nothing looks the same once it has been broken.
You strip the stalk beneath cool running water,
thank the roots, rub dirt from mottled leaves.

You bring leaves to a rolling boil until water blooms
until the kitchen is thick with green ghosts.
Much as you ache, no grandmother appears to anoint head
and bind hips. You sit alone in the rising steam, leaking rivers.
The sea has ebbed now, and you are only clay and salt.

Steep yourself in silence. No murmured prayers
stir the air, only the soft hum of your breath.
Fear kneels beside you like a midwife,
tending each hour, each fraying strand of pain. 

The baby sleeps against the hot lightning of your chest
fascia and bone flaring, your core a cavern echoing
currents of blood and loss. His breathing echoes in the dark.
Alone, you oil the silvering fault lines of your belly,
murmur prayers to a god who has been torn, same as you.

XVII:  / Kendra Brooks

Upon average
One poet dies 
Every day.
Somewhere 
In the world
Right now a poet
Is facing death.

A poet died 
yesterday.
I read his poems
More out of curiosity
Than sympathy, I confess.
Including a self-portrait 
In 5 parts, each framed in regret.

It’s likely I never would have read
A single poem of his had he lived 
Or was alive today. 
Unlike poets, poetry endures
As the trees in winter 
Find new life in the spring.

I’d like to imagine, 
With a little more luck, 
One of his poems 
Might have found me
Before he was struck.
Now his death 
Has secured that fate.

When was the summer I turned pretty?  / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Or did I? 
There was no sudden strike of longing returned— 
only, it seemed, an endless paging through fantasies, 
novels smuggled, dimmed flashlight under the covers. 
What would it mean to be wholly in the dream’s triangle, 
tangled in a wallpaper’s cerulean stems and ocean 
weeds? I think I could feel home in someone else’s 
beach house. I could flit between brothers, ruin a few 
Christmases, ghost my mom in Paris. I am, I admit, 
one of the million millennial women waiting for Belly 
to make the right decisions. Funny, the high school 
interns I work with like to debate, see scenes differently. 
We're just looking from opposite ends at fate. My young 
coworker asks if I know the ending. Her eyes dance 
with revelation, long dark curls, that little slump in her  
shoulders from getting tall over this recent summer. 
She’ll never see it coming, her turn, that corner. 

Constitutional Crises / Yvette Perry

Article I. Section 2.

“Three minutes,”the anonymous caller said. I imagine the organist playing perfect 
Fifths while the Girls help each other with their sashes and bows, smiling in the mirror 
Of the basement bathroom. I imagine them singing along with the chords, lyrics
All memorized from hearing the choir sing them Sundays. I imagine the
Other worshipers climbing the steps, entering through the church doors. Other
Persons, then unknown, had already been there, installing hate beneath the steps.

Article I. Section 9.

The reverie of my fantasy shatters like the stained glass. I marinate, instead, on the Great
Migration: masses of people exchanging known dangers for new ones, 
Or escaping to North and West at the urging of those who had gone before them.
Importation of rituals, music, dreams provide a sense of warmth despite the cold 
Of the weather and/or of the reception they receive. Who can say if they will thrive in 
Such climes as these?  Hard work might not always be sufficient. Integration, when other 
Persons do not think proper to admit them, might always be a gamble.

Article VI.

Shall I continue to think about rotted promises and dreams destroyed? I may
Be, myself, rotted and destroyed,
Bound by proof of history to question the viability of democracy,
By proof of history to distrust the
Oath to the Blessings of Liberty the Constitution demands,
Or I may be required to ratify this history as
Affirmation that Overcome, for We, shall someday never be.

Ancient Time / Amber Wei

Breathing finds it hard
to be still
when air is flight in cruising altitude
transitory
so ripples in oblong heights
shifts the barometer’s measure
of the morrow’s weather
so the breath is sucked in refuge
caged by prediction
and the sundial has no direct feedback from the sun
for shade has occluded sensation
to be able to feel only what is lost
and for the rays to be missed
by the clouds

Deadvlei, Part 6  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit