THE APRIL, 2024 30/30 PROJECT PAGE

The volunteer poets for April 2024 are Sarah Chestnut, Marnie Bullock Dresser, Marshall Malin, Jessie Lynn McMains, Manthipe Moila, Kalliopy Paleos, Briton Szydloski, and Elizabeth Walton.

If you’d like to volunteer for a 30/30 Project month, please fill out our application here and warm up your pen!

Day 30 / Poem 30

 As Though Time Were a Pencil / a cento / Sarah Chestnut 

With lines selected by and from Sarah Chestnut, Marnie Bullock
Dresser, Marshall Malin, Jessie Lynn McMains, Manthipe Moila,
Kalliopy Paleos, Briton Szydloski, and Elizabeth Walton.

Late afternoon sun hits the ruined cream brick
of middle age, one of the blessings            moths dancing
around empty, absent flames                     I never
imagined the shapes time would make us

I wish we were all friends again lounging on the porch
with the dark peonies and the windchimes and nobody
secretly planning anything sad

The coffee’s worse but you can drink it
low down.    throat and bones
I probably had tears in my eyes half the game, wanting
fresh white shoes     absinthe and the burlesque moon, love

I’m having dizzy spells         The rain persists
His body a broken temple for god
and the night after, like      wrappers and shattered glass
the angry clock clicks its tongue
pearl buttons hanging loose

It’s okay
now take
your time
little one

It’s still light out. Inside, sudden strength
Get some salt                        pepper
coriander       a saw your arm
It is in the moving of the tongue     we clamber forth,
knowing there is no stillness

Red clover Grape hyacinth               Here comes
the green, the winter wheat, the rye,
alfalfa, deciduous out-leafing on the hillsides.
My words are sticky like honeycomb
I wish for this fire to keep burning Creating
seams of emptiness

If a wandering one will slipper on
Laugh their notes of peeling paint 
Pain passes
           a holy rapture
           of butterflies
Held warm
           the quince trees bloom
Pain passes

Two mugs          Two spoons
Honeypot          Pitcher of cream

We are silent in the pale light
You can drink it          Lip or lick the ice

Smile something tight.

The Hidden Fair Family of Spring Green / Marnie Bullock Dresser

Chapter 1, Part 1

When Dewey needs to go Out Front
(that’s where the humans are),
he puts on his rat coat and hat
or drives his limestone car.

It isn’t really stone of course.
He learned to paint onstage,
where Styrofoam can be a tree,
or a dog or a house.

It’s pedal-powered, his limestone car,
with tires as quiet as fleas
and excellent brakes because stopping
is crucial. He has to freeze

when humans appear if he’s driving
(or scurry and hide like a rat).
Today he froze for an hour and a half
until he was alone

again and able to sweep for glitter
leftover from human crafts.
He’s planning a party for his favorite sister
whose birthday is tomorrow.

Most of Taliesin’s walls
are great to hide beside,
irregular, bumpy, bulging,
them being limestone and all.

Just one more pocked, tan lump,
that’s what Dewey looks like
until he gives himself
the all-clear and opens the trunk

to get whatever tool he needs.
His broom’s a coffee stirrer
with bristles made of dried crabgrass.
His dustpan? A pumpkin seed.

Tonight he’s home and decorating.
(Rhiannon’s gone off visiting.)
Aluminum foil disco ball,
strips of Post-It notes

for yellow streamers, yellow beads
aloft on waxed string,
and the old iPod they saved from the trash
to get everyone dancing.

(The music doesn’t have to be loud;
their ears are very big.
Even when they’re in a crowd,
the noise they make is tiny.)

When Dewey had stored the glitter in buckets
(half-n-half single-serve cups),
he plugged in the string of fairy lights
and sat and found much to admire.

He was drifting some when his cousin Lloyd
arrived with terrible news.
Rhiannon had sent a message via pigeon
to the dovecote on the roof:

Her friend’s apartment had been vandalized,
her friend nowhere to be found.
When Dewey recovered from being startled,
he held his breath and diaphanized.

Honied Thorn / Marshall Malin

We see deer less 
          during storm season—

sudden downpour
          strike of lightning (thunder) 
          immediate shaking of the leaves

oust the fiery auto-da-fé—
          which takes us 
          quite far away. 

Best not speak 
          now we’ve witnessed this—

Common People / Jessie Lynn McMains

That night a dull Wicker Park bar turned Britpop discotheque,
Jane the Marvelous and I danced until out thriftstore finery drenched in sweat.
She was sleeping with the DJ, I was fucking the bartender. They’d invited us,
though we were warned ahead of time they wouldn’t dance with us or act
like boyfriends that night because they’d be too busy mixing and spinning.

We danced together, or went outside to smoke some fags, feel the goosebump
rush of sweat-drenched skin hitting spring-night air. We didn’t care.
We were young, burned so bright; existed in that slim window when it seems that
everyone you want also wants you. We were fabulous, amazed, drunk
like rich kids though we were not. But we didn’t care because—

Jane, who lived in the flat below mine, had just cut my hair—in exchange
for a few foodstuffs from the supermarket—into a 1980s-hipster bob, I had
a new job at a record shop, and our not-boyfriends had put us on the guest
list that night, so no cover, and my bartender gave us free rum and Coca-
Cola. We danced, a perpetual-motion blur, ‘80s movie montage,

while her DJ spun Britpop, ska, Northern Soul, new wave, mod. We kissed
in the bathroom, though she was straight, our mouths tasting of ash and
lime. We danced, we danced, and then, for the last song of the night, our DJ
played Pulp. “Common People.” He came down from the DJ booth and
the bartender emerged from behind the bar and the bass came in,

the synth, the tambourine, and they danced with us, the whole club danced,
screamed along, and I don’t know how common all the people were.
They could’ve been like me. Not rich, but some degree of middle class,
studying at—like the lyric I always misheard—some artist’s college, yet
also knowing what it was like to fail, to watch your life slide

out of view, no meaning or control, and then dance and drink and screw,
because there’s nothing else— We were fabulous, marvelous in that old
bar that night, suddenly new. Jane, her denim jacket spangled with enamel
pins; me, my striped stockings and pretty pink dress that was half Molly
Ringwald, half Jackie O. Our skinny boytoys in their tight suits and

biggest, most Jarvis Cocker-esque sunglasses—at night—and the bar lights
flashing purple off everyone’s drink tumblers and everyone singing, Oh, la, la, la, la,
Oh, la, la, la, la, Oh, la, la, la, la, Oh, la, la, la, la— Oh, we wanted to live like
uncommon people. Like common people, we wanted to live, like we wanted to
live, like we wanted, we wanted to.

An insomniac wonders / Manthipe Moila

Living in a body is such a strange thing.
She fears that if she pressed hard enough
against hers, it would dislodge and something
feather-haired would come tumbling out.
She doesn’t know how to break like that,
how to become like the women around her –
queens of transfiguration and dark webbing.

People here say she has a small face. She wonders
how much smaller it would be without all this tired.
Fatigue blows a pungent wind into her eyes
until they water. If she crushed them tight, would
it unspool the river of her?

She wants 
she wants 
she wants
not to know
an aorta of a thing, to stretch out her ripening body,
to be gated by the sleep she so desperately desires. 

Fairy Bird Shares Her Concerns About the Afterlife / Kalliopy Paleos

You can’t miss Quick Mama’s Gentle Neon Cemetery, right next to Fat Daddy-O’s Portuguese Laundry. Just turn left into the alley with all the balconies and climb up whichever one catches your eye. All you have to do to get buried there is find the magic word on the balustrade. Then the undertaker sh’bop-bops over to Grandma Spectacular watching her television program behind the counter at Daddy-O’s & ask her to see if any strangers forgot anything in the dryer six months or more ago. Not less than six months, that’s the policy. You never know when people might come back, looking for lingering anecdotes, incidents, and/or accidents woven into their shirts and blouses, their inseams and underwear. Those people who came back from Chicago were real pissy when they didn’t get their wedding dresses back, and I guess we could understand that. Still, you can get buried naked. 

I’ve been watching the Gentle Neon myself. Don’t want to fall in too early, even if they do say it’s comfortable as that old I Dream of Genie bottle. Uncle Johnny told me to wait for him here before I go anywhere, but that was 150 years ago and he probably won’t be back. Nothing in the mailbox either. Quick Mama thinks I’m making that up. Maybe I am, how should I know?

Last time I had a fight with Grandma Spectacular, she just up and cried. Never seen that before, so I figured she wasn’t long for this world. After all them go-go boots she wore out and so many gentlemen clients in the parking lot, the Ford Motors designed a special plush back seat in her honor for their latest family sedan. That was Grammy Spekky all right. Maybe I can get her job behind the counter when she goes Neon. Quick Mama says the whole jist is you never know what’s next. I guess I can wait and see in the meantime. 

Futura / Elizabeth Walton

The kid doesn’t know the beach once had shell 
            so she looks for a rock or a seed. To fossick is still the instinct. 
            Few of those left have mother of pearl sheen. Who will remember, who

under forty remembers conk or baleen.
            She doesn’t know how fast they fall, 
            colonies of mussels, of oysters, or beings on legs. Colonies of fish and men, 

decarbonised, decoked, decarburised. Sequestrated means taking possession 
            until the debt’s paid down. But who has recrystalised listening?
            Who says the kid should pay up for superheated acid spending?

Layering fields of seagrass meadow with kelp forest decline. Things can’t always be cleaned
            with Pine-O-Clean, not here on the beach, where empty product floats and the
            the shelfish life expiration date extends well beyond  

                                       known futures
                                                                                                          future futures.

Forget the Symbiocene, the Anthropocene, any other scene, 
            we all live in the Plasticene now, as will the kid’s child, 
            fossicking for sand or crushed rock as will all those to come, all those

                                      yet                   to                                 grieve. 

 I’m looking 
            at beaches, collecting rock sand or 
            dust. I stood here not long ago and collected 
                                                             s  h   ells.

The girl stands now in the shadow of Rome and trilobites gone home. And I’m 
            still in the market for a sea cucumber, a shell with heart 
            or a child with lip that isn’t 

                                                     bro       
                                                     ken

Day 29 / Poem 29

Waste Not the Hour / Sarah Chestnut

Though this morning
you walk half-
asleep and a low
berm of self-
pity would steal
your footing, do not
stop but to bless the sniffing
your dog wakes for.
He is not sorry
for himself or the demands
of his nose.
No one here is saying
sorry, poor you—
Not the marsh marigold
Not the azure bluets
Not the Canada geese guiding their twelve
goslings to the far bank.
The fiddleheads are the body
articulating openness notch by notch—
Cinnamon Fern
Broad Beech Fern
Oh, love this: Sensitive Fern.
The wild turkey
who further disturbed
the turned soil of your barrels
does not regret her search
for seeds and wriggling things.
The dabbling mallard loves
his emerald head
and how it knows to plunge.
The meadow vole may well be
the meadow’s soul.
And the bobcat who sauntered
across the road, face ruff
already relishing
the gamey sweetness
of young rabbit,
was entirely unbothered,

managed a mere half-
glance in your direction.

DECLINE AND FALL: WISCONSIN / Marnie Bullock Dresser

What are you supposed to do when your campus closes?
Compare it to amputation or death or war?
It’s really just a matter of degree. My losses

are not Palestinian in scope, no hostages
involved; I know I have a lot to be grateful for,
but what are you supposed to do when your campus closes?

Pin your pain down like an insect you can analyze?
It’s tiny. No one will miss it. There are so many more.
It’s really just a matter of degree. The losses

aren’t mine alone, though. All those students, all those classes,
all gone. A multi-billion dollar state surplus all but ignored.
What are you supposed to do when your campus closes?

Agate Nesaule’s Woman in Amber very forcefully argues
that trauma isn’t something you can compare.
It might not even be a matter of degree for some losses.

I’m retired, but I’ve put off moving all the boxes
out of my office. I’ve been in denial. Heartsore.
What are you supposed to do when your campus closes?
No more graduations or degrees. Just losses.

Dry Swallowing Small Pills / Marshall Malin

Not that he spent the day 
with his siblings, the night with his father. 
It’s that everyone ignored me. 
Who am I in this context? 
A wind blown through to disrupt the crop? 
A blackout in the city that lasts for only one night? 
A hurricane blowing down what was once holy and 
has since become a shameful representation of a 
once good man? It’s that my brother 
doesn’t concern himself with me.
It’s that my mother loves herself first
even though she’ll deny it to the tomb. 
It’s that I’ve been alone all day, 
waiting for something to happen, 
getting attached to characters 
in movies more than any real person. 
When did they switch? 
When did reality become falser? 
At least you can sense the editors at work, 
hatching storylines—
in real life, the great conspiracy I’ve 
uncovered isn’t written or manipulated. 
It’s all in my head. 
I have no cameras to focus on. 
I have no recorded details of the coins I 
threw in the fountain in Washington Square Park. 

We smoked cigarettes outside of Bobst. 
You told me you were once happy with your 
boyfriend, and now you’re addicted to cocaine and 
Adderall. You gave me bumps in a bathroom of 
Bamboleo a few blocks away. 
We took a selfie in a broken mirror. 
It’s been a few days after my last birthday 
since I’ve heard from you. 
I think about you more than you probably think about 
me. But I’m a nostalgic person. 
I wish I hadn’t pushed away so many people, 
but I also wish people weren’t so ready to give me reasons. 
You were always so beautiful, no makeup, bags under
your eyes, that New-Yorkness that made that one guy 
stop us to ask for a light, called us the last 
smokers in New York City. I miss you, and 
somehow, I feel like I’ve failed you. 

What’s Inside a Girl? / Jessie Lynn McMains

Inside one girl there was a plain-bellied watersnake & a dead soldier & a broken home. Inside another girl there was a dead baby & a blue streak & an acoustic guitar. In one there was a zigzag of scars & methamphetamines & wannabe rock stars. In one there was coffee from a 24-hour diner & a British accent & a padlock on a chain. In another there was a bad boy & a girl crush & a secret fire tattoo. One girl housed a ghetto & a bus ride & a big sleep. & one girl played host to vintage hats & downtown rats & those birds with the gasoline wings. One had a box of swords & a way with words & a permanently broke-ass heart. Another had horses with their sparking hooves & pianos in flames & five hundred names. Inside one girl there was a pill bottle & a sailor stripe & a twilight. & inside another the night-blooming jasmine & the green-feathered eyes & the tap-dancing rain. In one there was belly dance & Baba Yaga; in another, rum & Rumplestiltskin. In one girl was a mung-bean smell & a handmade poster; in another, a radio & a rabbit hole. & in another there was a railroad bridge & a rusted harmonica. Inside one girl was another girl was another girl. I cracked them open and went down.

I want to be one less thing to carry / Manthipe Moila

but when the water gathers me like a moon
I shake my head, struggle to keep
it from dragging me with its infinite arm.
The world spills onto a chair and slips off.
The village of me softens into a diagram
of query. The question is a curved body.
I am not sure what to call where I am,
how far it reaches. Is this what it means
to sink? Is this sinking? 

The body bends towards an oasis
as though toward forgiveness, is now
borderless, without territories; is now
landing softly where the water wants it to.

Each cell its own heart / Kalliopy Paleos

Lying in the grass my dear friend
how many insects stealing secrets from our eyelashes
and birds swishing coy tail feathers into our hair
how many times I coughed, a little sick but better now
and calls coming in to our phones forgotten over there

Falling asleep in the shade my dear friend
and we don’t have to answer anything that rings
how many shadows clear away from our ears
hearing each other with every heart we have

Rhodes III / Elizabeth Walton

Gray – was the morning, and home was where the heart was as we spoke to the tender man           
with sharp cheese teeth waiting for the sun to return and cast his gaze away from us          
towards Deep Ocean, outside his home camp on the headland, 
bare of carpet and other encounters, a place for shoes and keys and oddments. 

Homeless – was he though we were not, not at this moment, 
girder and cross satellite        tracking           his       movements 

in ShareThis Cookies: __stid, us __utma. 
He was drinking chrysanthemum bubble tea. __utmc.

Accountable – he held, us in vivid dreams __utmb of 
what is no longer there or viable. SID.

I saw the hallway of his ideas, SSID, ULS, connecting his tents 
with ripped blue    tarps and bits of rope he’d found in the sea. Hej you are 
always in control of your        cookies! __utmz.
Stoic – was his walk toward the brine for 

morning 
ablutions and 
other salutations.

                                    And I,  at a plastic picnic table. 
                                    And I    was there when the night was done, the folkloric ritual,            
                                            I,   in the narrow hallways, hording plants. Whatnots, and other                                               
stuff. Going Shopping! __uset. 
Stacked – was his life in the cargo cult of 

KNAGGLIG boxes, 23x31x15, lots of lost space, for             
YouTube Cookies to store their demographics. 

                        In Theophrastus and Aristotle’s day, peripatetic was the art of thinking 
                        in the shadow of humanity’s ancient columns. 
                        In between house sits, peripatetic is the business of doing whatever 

                        it is we do, in the footsteps of the walking, Isis to Horus, 
                        homeless, the new elixir of life. But Google Plusone Cookies                                                                                              
rememberme always 
                                                            remember not to 
                                                forget where we’ve been online, 
                                    indoors, or out in the country, 
                        anointing us on the concrete 
            terraces of our homelands.

Grim – was the mood as he bent to inspect our dog and deliberate. Were we 
            worthy of his occupation for a dog sit? Trending Now through 
            Filmtrailer Cookies: and SERVERID. The internet always knows where you’ve 
            been. Scram cookies, go on: BEAT it. 

No –     said my veins on scarlet parchment as the man searched my ugly
            face behind dark glasses for trace of purpose. Were we fit for purpose?       
            He provided a fedora infused decline, eating sandwiches, apologising 
            that he’d best get on with his day. 

Born –  was he, a stone’s throw from the Harbour Bridge, in the metal forest, the 
            proper habitat for Union Carbide days, Polychlorinated dioxins and furious furans, 
            slopped beneath impervious caps as Australia was abandoned by mr toxic who took          
            his profits and now this taken place abandons all who loved their homelands.

Ikea –   now stands on lands, like Vietnam, where nothing can live breathe 
or die. DDT, DDE,      DDD, Agent Orange, no match for 
Deep Ocean, cleaned for Green Olympics. Paint    
in the sea, no problem, as long as the colour is right, 
the colour of traditional living,          
says the Oxyplast sheet, at a carcinogenic 
site too large for remediation.

  This poem has fragments from “Double Image” and “Builders” by Judith Wright, Ikea catalogues, hazmat material data sheets and html cookie language.

Day 28 / Poem 28

The Lord’s Arrival / Sarah Chestnut

When I was forsaken,
When I carried my soul outside of myself, bent to the task—
Came the quiet, unexpected surprise:
God’s embrace.
No brass majesty, fanfare or pomp.
Rather, silent and simple, God came, embracing.
Not on a sun-bright day you would exclaim beautiful,
But in besieged night. War torn tumult.
From my eyes the self-scale
Sloughed. Goodbye vain youth,
Hello forever, O him, lit from within,
My vision.

-Ady Endre
(translated from the Hungarian by Sarah
Chestnut and Marta Burbeck)

MY OWN PERSONAL MANDELA EFFECT / Marnie Bullock Dresser

In the summer, you could see when a car turned off
the highway because a dust plume rose up,
and there was so little traffic I could play chicken
with that vehicle from a long ways off. I would ride
my Kawasaki 100 (or Yamaha, or Honda, in any case,
not a mini-bike) on a loop behind the chicken coop
then straight down the drainage ditch if it was dry
and cross the road over into Eleanor and Jarvis’s orchard
before the car passed my house. The last time I did it
I pulled into the garage where my father was waiting
and he asked, “Have a good ride?” I said yes, he said “Good
Because it’s your last one.” It was him in the car,
of course, and I hadn’t even noticed. When I asked him
years later he said he didn’t remember anything like that,
but his Alzheimer’s was starting to kick in, so who knows
if it matters, in this case, whether that happened or not.
It might not have. I can see myself in that orchard
but I wasn’t allowed to go there alone and I generally
didn’t do what I wasn’t supposed to do. Most of the time.

But something got me demoted to the Honda Express Moped,
And I was absolutely forbidden to go on or across the road.
It was slightly more fun than a bicycle. We wore paths
around the far edges of our yard and my Granma’s,
but when it came time to sell it, I wasn’t upset.
The only moment I loved that machine was when
my Aunt Margie rode it for the first time, not knowing
where to put her feet or how to slow it down.
She just shot off across the yard, legs straight out,
going faster and faster and laughing and screaming
“oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,” and I don’t remember
her stopping or crashing so maybe she’s still going,
she and everyone else who saw it either dead now or lost
in dementia, except for me, and here I am, unsure
what I’m remembering versus what I imagined.

Losing (Patience) / Marshall Malin

Begging the beginning of goodbye, 
you arrange to have your letters sent 
by boat, all your money tied in stocks—
you didn’t know quite how hell would 
take you. I’m begging your watch, 
an ounce of your family, a drop of
something grander than these simple 
walls. Noise contrasted with white 
paint, the balcony lost its railing, all 
fell into the lake. Beg comprehension
all you like, but unless you listen, 
I’ll go on skipping the record around—

Listening to Joni Mitchell with My Mom / Jessie Lynn McMains

Doing my hair on a Sunday evening while tired-drunk / Manthipe Moila

The water seethes inside the teapot
and the cloves soften.
My floor is feathered with broken
pieces. I smile something tight
with my wet and sour teeth.

My hips curve inward, as though to obey
some law of my svelte anatomy.
My back slopes to the side
and something snaps again –
it is my fine hairs. They wind and jerk
until they finally give. I gather them
into a difficult web. My fingers are islets
of want, heavy with the dread of wreckage.

All day, each break is a familiar
rhythm of awakening to a torrid world.
There is always a reason to hate the body;
its slow tumble, it lapping up of need,
all its damage misting the room, then
settling onto the slick and infinite floor. 

Promenade with Thoreau on Tides of Dirt / Kalliopy Paleos

[ . . . the ground is strewn with windfalls]
and whorling air in the shape of snails
breezes imprinted with the shape of iris petals
arriving in tides

the ground bears the breath
of vacant footstep lifted
and a heft of departure

it is strewn with shadows
that laughed and flitted
gossiping birds
peevish silvertailed beasts
and the blessed death of sinking,

sinking into the industrious dirt
from where the the flecks of silver
smile the sky back up to itself
taunting the clouds with their own lethargy
in which its workaholic worms
stop at nothing, creating seams of emptiness
for the seed to open its umbrella of becoming

[just as we occupy the heavens of the gods without knowing it]
swim like fish past each other
with eyes unclosing
our smooth self-destructing skin
a mosaic of bottle flies and mosquitoes

and so I say stop avoiding the question
I ask you again
what is the ground
and can you prove it is not trajectory?

(the lines in brackets are borrowed from H.D. Thoreau’s Wild Apples)

Tempe / Elizabeth Walton

GODMORGON. Highway brutal bearing 
            the bend, we take our DIMFORSEN 
            Best Sellers from the car and              carry them 
            to the               pool. 594.946.55. The cotton
            cellulose xanthate blend is lightweight, absorbent. GODMORGON. 

GODMORGON. Grass fresh fragrant, the fella forgoes his 4 tonne truck, shaking 
            blonde dreads of fish and scurvy. The diesel humm stuns of 
            jerry cans stacked up back by bivvy bag. Happy New Year ornaments, 
            adornment, a visionary.          Count in cavernous cubic cadence, the hydraulic chute, 
            the balcony of his mobile high rise. GODMORGON GODMORGON.

GODMORGON, GODMORGON. Leika scans her 
            pool season card at the eye-catching 
            OXMYREN wash-basin.        She applies for humm
            fast approval.              Repaying today or in her        own way 
            over the coming 5 months.                 my god is that truck guy going to the pool?

GODMORGON, GODMORGON, Dan the pool clan-man,
            shrouded in shreds of steam. Download the App,\
            use our humm//CARD today.                         Kind Dan carries
            KUGGIS and LEKMAN to shallows.                        Get in 
            quick, bag a bargain for $816.

The good morning fan, Dan plays Saturday   Night Fever     on
            plastic speakers.          A treatise 
            under sharp neon lights, this 
            Disco Inferno, this                  splash.             This book of    Trammp secrets. 
            15/25 cm and bodily desires will dwindle. 095.058.35.

Is he coming in here? Is he is he? How touching, Leika says, eyes 
            wet and round, mask contorting temples. 
            No interest, ever!        She swims through silvern atomic 12 bitter spar
            crushed and reformed.            Our basin of destiny, our        therapy, remedy
            our jealous identity, backstroking       the sea of our dreams.

He’s like that other guy, she says, belly up, breathless by 
            beam, blending bosom boisterous manners and meandering. I see him 
            hanging around. This bathroom for all is beautifully 
            shaped with a scratch and match-resistant carcinogenic surface, 
            designed to deride our languid dips and desires.

GODMORGON says she,       to                     he in the          fast 
            lane starting the day with a sense of               calm, a 
            light framed wooden expression. Oh tell me that guy with the 
            stink is not getting in, says Leika.      Her pre-approval 
            proposes and disposes of how and when to repay. Oh please, that’s disgusting. 

Jerry-can man now nowhere an 
            absentee with clean sheen in the spree of a traditional bathroom 
            w countertop wsh-basin 304.224.14.              Lower prices where possible. 
            A good humm run.                  5 fortnights, up to 20 weeks, 
            a free tea strainer and a year round guarantee of up to $2,000.

Good mornings clear and here hot showers, seven days from 6-am, for 
            men who do    removal work.                         A bathroom for everybody
            on self-serve tap.                     Sleeping rough, ‘tween
            twiggy sprigs of brushwood.              Min working pressure 0.5 bar 
            7.25 psi.          Up to 50% off hundreds of products. 

Tempe mornings on the Swamp Road scene, a          Prison 
            Gate Farm with time to pay, lower     prices for the 
            white stained oak effect.         Clear cascades from the          Brogrund tap. 
            Guaranteed. He’ll get at least 10 years           
            for steamy showers. 903.589.43. (Max. flow rate)/GODMORGON.

GODMORGON. Dig for shale or race a greyhound, bake the man who slept in the
            brick stack.      Best brogue shoes, four bucks, at Tempe Tip.            Until this.

            In Tentury Tenty1, the flightpath shelter for              shipping washbasins,  
            Zorbas collects                        10,000 smash plates.               The homeless hide 
            in bathrooms at closing for a night free from             six degrees. GODMORGON.               

This poem has fragments from Rumi’s Muhammad and the Huge Eater, Basho 849, 948 and 886 and Ikea Bathroom Catalogues and quotes the title of two disco songs. 

Day 27 / Poem 27

In Defense of Odes / Sarah Chestnut

There are those who companion
the elderly. How my mother-in-law
despises the word. Still, can we
not say it? How will we draw into
our own sagging arms those frail years
without a name for it?
Monday,
a friend led me with eyes closed
to call to mind a face I love
and praise it. Notice, she said,
one delightful thing. Now say it.
Next day, I watched a friend weep
for one she was paid to care for.
Bit of shopping. Tidy-ups. Trip
to the nail salon. They’re all celebrating,
she quaked, that she chose this, she chose
this, that she got to choose. As if
choice was the only freedom.
Then the life left
to live caught my friend by the throat,
and she choked: of course it’s money.
Call to mind a face to praise.
It only took five days.

Is it wrinkled? Winking?
Five days.
Is it smooth with resolve to say,
I will go no further.

Some window of reconsideration.

Now. This is harder. Can you bring
before the eye of your mind
your own face, now, as it is, and see
there something you might praise?
Five days. Five days.
Months—it takes months
for tests. Won’t even be
a funeral.
Shall I praise this commitment
not to inconvenience anyone?
Once, it was common to pray

for a slow death. Shall I burn
incense at the altar of Quick & Painless?
Do I want different?
Bring to mind the face of one
you love. Now, one you hate.
Now, your own, which could be both,
or either.

And praise it.

GENERALIZING FROM THAT ONE VERY SPECIFIC FEAR / Marnie Bullock Dresser

I still don’t love public bathrooms, but I’ll use them
now. I wouldn’t when I was very young, unless
I absolutely had to. At school, I’d ask to go and go
home instead. I was a latch-key kid, so no one
was there to scold me, make me leave. I’d watch TV,
make a snack. My friend Cindy told me recently
she remembered one time I’d been gone so long
the teacher checked the bathroom, then asked
the class where I was. They called me up, I answered,
and all they said was “Come back.” No trouble,
no scolding, no punishment. My brother says
I got away with a lot because of my back problems—
scoliosis, spinal fusion, 2 huge casts, Milwaukee Brace.
He might be right in this case, though in general
I didn’t do much misbehaving, or just didn’t get caught.

The phobia started from a 1973 movie called Trapped,
aka Doberman Patrol. A man gets mugged and left
for dead in a bathroom stall. By the time he comes to,
bloodthirsty Dobermans have been let loose.
He survives but with great difficulty and it’s a very, very
suspenseful movie.  James Brolin played the guy, but
I always think it’s Dennis Weaver when I try
to look it up. I always find Duel and I know
that’s not right (chased by truck, not dogs). Either way,
I hated being in stores when they were about to close,
and I hated public bathrooms. I still love men
like that, clever and strong even when besieged
and assaulted, ever on the wrong side of the odds.

Happy Tears / Marshall Malin

When I realized the surf was too far
for us to advance, we picked blueberries, 
sat among the swaying willow trees—

around the pond, fog, a stone bench 
placed nowhere good, in a small dip 
in the landscape, where a shining child 

sat waiting for definition. We spoke to 
the child, but we had no words to describe
the light—said Let me dim, see me real—

we never knew where the child went,
you like to think inside of us, I think 
it was maybe a hallucination—

we now wane like moons revolving 
resolving child, elder, we in moment 
in movement, we will never still the river.

I’ll tell you now that I love you, but it 
will mean more tomorrow when I say it
again, bathing your ankle in a trickle over

rocks—we held hands and drifted into 
the tunnels we were told dangerous, light 
upon exiting wasn’t any kind of heaven, 

but we continue to smoke joints, listen 
to albums in the darkness, make my home 
a movie theater, a dinner party, a bar, a club. 

At some point in whichever night, you 
kiss my left cheek and ask ¿todo bien?
I consider. I am with you. Sí, te digo. 

Similarities / Jessie Lynn McMains

Small cloth-thing,
With a thin white string.

Does a sort of steeping
In a hot, moist place

For a minute—an hour?—
Or two. Yet unlike its twin:

No one would want to drink
This dark and bitter brew.

Stay  / Manthipe Moila

I have been thinking
about the stretch
marks on my lower 
half again –  the little 
tributaries that spill
behind me. 

Would I come quick 
and undone 
if I pulled them
loose?
Would they unspool 
the river of me? 

They were only 
making room,
announcing 
to the world 
of my body 
that more of me 

has arrived,
and promises 
to stay as long
as I stay.

Alma Mater / Kalliopy Paleos

She doesn’t know how long it will take to walk back to town or if she will stop in the bar to see if he is there. She doesn’t know if she will try to shoplift a book or two just for fun like in the old days to honor, as she used to solemnly say, the Goddess of Theft. She doesn’t know if she will walk briskly by the old post office simply to see if it is there, or look up at the cupola like a steeple lousy with ghosts. She likely won’t. Nothing actually ever was in sepia. Nothing actually ever was in technicolor. Nothing black and white. The trees lift up like cheerful parishioners in their pews, placentae of life with April buds along the sidewalk as she plods forward, feet hurting just a little, thinking I might not have time. I’ll have to fill the tank before heading east. No need to check on the bar, or if the cherished greasy spoon has decided to make anything other than bacon and eggs. And as far as appeasing the Theft Queen goes, she already has all of the books, some of them double. 

C# / Elizabeth Walton

Twining Glycine
Schelhammera undulata         
Hertz  277.18
Hush, bird song, this euphuistic   flower 
 vulnerably standing in, resilient. Subtle this presence      

this  hallucination, this quiver vision,
soft swelled <ppp> this sonorous bloom. 

Ecstatic this space, rhapsodic,
tratado  green, twining elated, this abundant 

slip toward preservation. This grass climber calls 
for a shift in Love, this Mysterious 

consciousness, this enharmonic balance of Symbiocene. 
This vision of season’s door. Doors also call 
time, moving on, immutable, inscrutable, unassailable, this paleo friend. 
 Bolero arrives, this slow motif, building
variations. This banquet ends with a bloom. Repeat :II
this jubilance, Twining Glycine.

Day 26 / Poem 26

The Thirst is All Yours / Sarah Chestnut

Here is a darling bowl. Call it
harbor of your longing. Your lips
are for slurping, ravishing, lingering
along the capable rim. Remember
your daughter and her friend, in hysterics,
fetching each other and each person
at the eclectic table water bowls
and cackling at the dare.
That meal was a racket of fervency.
Lap it up like this! Your thirst
is a meadow of milkweed.
The monarchs are desperate
and will be assuaged no other way.
Lo, attend to the unceremonious
moment. Let the blunting and sour
past drowse, wake to the electric
flank of this day, pulling you
like a fearless and adamant dog
toward the horizon of fulfillment.
Lo, the bowl is a poem. The words
a questioning and questionable liquid.
But the thirst. The thirst is all yours.

WHEN YOU LIVE IN TALIESIN TOWN / Marnie Bullock Dresser

You know people whose name is Lloyd-Jones, several
of them, and you think they’re all great. You get to witness
a Halloween costume, a kind of Cossack hat
and goatherder vest, made of the blue shag carpet
that was systematically removed because—really?
Blue shag carpet in a UNESCO Heritage Site?

One of your plays might get performed at the Hillside Theater
where Walt Whitman lives on the wall. The person who knows
more than anyone alive about the history of Taliesin comes over
to hang out on your porch. You can make up a song
for your baby, sung to the tune of “Alouette”
(“Taliesin, Tallie-allie-esin, Taliesin, Tan-Y-Deri too.”
There was a verse about the Mann Act you no longer recall.)

But most importantly, when you’re headed to your audiologist
or Walmart or Lands End or whatever, you get to
drive over the river, trace the S in the road, and watch
it all unfold against the land. You have to crane your neck
to see the house if you’re driving south. Midway Barn
sort of steps forward and says hello, and you can see
Romeo and Juliet, the windmill hugging itself. Tan-Y-Deri’s there,
but looks like a clump of trees, which makes sense,
since Mr. Wright thought trees looked like buildings.

You turn around at Unity Chapel where the man with great hair
was, for a while, buried, and coming back north
you can look at the house and think once again
how close it hugs the hill behind, how from this distance
it is the limestone embodiment of nuance and grace,
and you think, once again, how you get to live here.

Run Fox / Marshall Malin

For an unthinkable time before time
existed, run fox, through the forest

laden with mushrooms and fairies, 
run fox, toward the last emptiness 

that exists between your realm and
mine, even though we’ll never see 

how the other has turned out, run fox, 
make years moments, end eternity—

savor the berries spilled and then run:
whatever you think in red spills out 

through green and blue, excellent 
night for a hunt, swell and bellow 

stalk the timelessness as it pursues
its own explanation for its absence. 

Rock Gods and Small Things / Jessie Lynn McMains

Today, there is something Nascita di Venere about my body. / Manthipe Moila

But everything else feels 
wrong – my hair; a pigeon’s nest 
that you could squeeze two 
good memes out of.

The pile of essays
that need marking, 
my Korean textbooks that
look at me all smug.

I want to put all the wrong
into a neat Jenga pile and 
knock it down. 

I am bent on putting my life in water,
And laying myself across a shell, 
and stretching out my ripening 
body, and laughing at any feathers
I may find in my hair.

Love Life / Kalliopy Paleos

Doorway
Hallway
Lightswitch

There are no women on as many 
Do Not Marry lists as me
No one, as many lacy tops 
not slipped off as me

Table
Bandstand 
Keys

I am at the top of Calls To Avoid 
lists around the globe
for my travels have been many and strange.

Bed 
Wineglass
Table

Or the night that kid turned 
a broken bottle neck on me
plenty of friends to hold me down 
if they’d wanted to bother

Shoes
Cup
Telephone
Pillow

A lifetime warped trudging back in the half-light
to a strange and costly home
hoping some of it will wash clean

A fashionable bathroom / Elizabeth Walton

White porcelain cracked tiles, slipped glass, all of it, all of it, we need. 

Nice things, big ticks, fast approval, loan acceptance.  

Reeking of debt these hands attend polyphonic payments.

Fashionable fridge, unbroken stove, moaning on towards absurdity and exquisite cleanliness.

Day 25 / Poem 25

“a planting of the Lord” / Sarah Chestnut

Winking violas, friends in Europe
are predicting civil war come November.
At least, widespread unrest. Hide your money
in your mattress like your grandparents
before you. Nail a tin coffee can to the floor
of your bedroom closet. Call it the bank.
I chose you for the complimentary,
opposite colors composing your sweet
pinch of a face. Bright violet, brightest
turmeric. You are first on sale each spring
and promise to keep giving. Some might
say, resilient. O viola, we need your sort
of brilliance. I bought a whole flat of you;
drank and drank each slow breath as I drove
home, your humble honey scent enough
to make me praise my own nose. You take
to pots or open ground, might self-seed.
We’re all from somewhere else anyway.
Everywhere someone like me takes you in
cracked hands, kneels down, digs a small hole,
says, as a prayer or radical act against despair,

grow.

AN ODE TO ARCADIA BOOKS / Marnie Bullock Dresser

As if drawn close by a copy of Silent Spring,
three eagles are circling on a thermal above the shop,
the white on them flashing when their circuit brings
them into the sun. That particular magic’s stopped,
but inside, on newly reconstructed floors,
the hefty spells of ten thousand books
just carry on. Maybe some new recipes to cook,
a caramel latte, that novel you’ve been looking for,
they’re all here. The Driftless Stargazing guy stopped by
to say hello—I’m so happy for him that reading
is disconnected from teaching now, that pleasure’s why
he’s here. That pleasure brought all this into being,
the creak of a wooden floor, the smell of caffeine
and new paper, a zillion words just waiting to be seen.

Human Kaleidoscope / Marshall Malin

His pose almost out of 
John Singer’s sketches

something off, a leg too 
raised, a face missing—

where’s his left testicle, 
what about his feet? 

His beauty incomplete
almost watches you 

nothingness in the know
a fierce background of 

darker colors—

Words Don’t Express My Meaning / Jessie Lynn McMains

As the record ends, a coda in retard: a dazzling jeremiad.
To change the world, my lifetime is to love to endure to suffer

the music. How queer. It fits inside the mouth long enough
to hold its nightly reenactments of the scandal that banished

it: that rumored three-way. The heavenly song of cock and cunt,
his good lust rippling like gold, all three of you waiting for his cobalt

blue cum to shoot into the air. Things come together by joining one
edge to another, and pressing to hold. Glitter & steam, fire, bodies

blurred sexless, defiant weeds smashing up through cement—
all collapsed now, total blam blam. I was throwing myself away, an

offering to wildest space, draped in my black cape of smut
glue and Subterranean. So much to hide beneath the spit

and mascara, the mask made of copper and bone. I am a myth
of my own making. Or is it my reflection in the yellowed glass?

Oh I am that queer thing pulling and greener than the blue sea.
(Maybe the jay didn’t know he was beautiful.) As of this darkening

gelatin and silver? We look to Venus, count names we can touch.
Too lovely for oblivion, we are the stars not wanting to burn out,

to burn a little longer—outlast a pop song’s bridge and some
chorus—cigarettes flaring in the dark.

—

This poem is composed of lines from the following sources:

Robert Pinsky – “The Hearts,” Roy G. Guzmán – “Queerodactyl,” Muriel Rukeyeser – “Käthe Kollwitz,” Crystal Valentine – “Blood Sex,” Paul Killebrew – “The Right to Be Past,” Randall Mann – “Leo & Lance,” Rebecca Seiferle – “Why I Am Glad That You Call Me Wicked,” Greg Johnson – “Sexual Outlaw,” CAConrad – “The Queer Voice: Reparative Poetry Rituals & Glitter Perversions,” Dennis Saleh – “Sexuality,” Terrance Hayes – “At Pegasus,” CAConrad – “Glitter in My Wounds,” Lisa Bickmore – “Dear David,” Cynthia Huntington – “Shot Up in the Sexual Revolution: The True Adventures of Suzy Creamcheese,” Cynthia Cruz – “Kingdom of Dirt,” Ciaran Berry – “The Death of Elvis,” Tina Chang – “Empress Dowager Boogies,” January Gill O’Neil – “Woman Swallowed by a Python in Her Cornfield,” Rachel Mennies – “September 23, 2016,” Brenda Shaughnessy – “Identity & Community (There is no “I” in “Sea”),” Ben Kline – “New Queer Cinema,” Omotara James – “Pier 52,” Alessandra Naccarato – “Homestead,” Robert Liddell Lowe – “The Glittering Grief,” Joy Priest – “When I See the Stars in the Night Sky,” Kyle Carrero Lopez – “Phragmites,” and Kelly Weber – “Snake-Jawed Epithalamium.”

Wilt / Manthipe Moila

I make cups of honeyed 
mint tea and forget about 
them, little ponds in white
clay gathering on my 
plastic floor. Fatigue blows 
a pungent wind into my eyes 
until they water, presses down 
my lids and holds, plucks 
the vellus hairs on my face 
as though bored. 

I think of my honey
as sweetened clove tea – 
sapid, a dark liquid 
that seeps me into a 
heavy sleep. I want to be 
one less thing to carry. 

I want my sweet to take me
to bed as I wilt, his lilt
in my ear, his hand 
caressing my course 
belly hair; for the heft 
of the other to curl away 
like smoke, to cool and leave me.

I want to wake unburdened 
next to my love, my skin 
reading his as light 
that enters a room, 
light that touches
me everywhere

Possible Biography of an Idea / Kalliopy Paleos

The silver ball 
falls from the hand
of the thief, rolls
down the cobbles
along the long gutter
where the cat trips it up
and screeches at the rats
who try to nibble it
but turn away empty
it being silver
and therefore worthless
and the little boy
toddles out of the house
to see what’s wrong with the cat
but sees no cat
only the ball 
and runs to grab it
lifts it to the light
presses it to his lips 
it being so beautiful
slips it into a pocket
where no one will dare
take it away 

Inner Space / Elizabeth Walton

Recipes from Disaster 
Bay the interstate
beaches collecting in 
corners, we live like this now, 
saying, think of the animals, 
of polyester threaded 
ocean beds, permanent
marker our messages 
in sand scratch away at the surface. 

The story would start 
with the then, to the now 
how the perfect cork screws and 
soft pork brews
inside plastic bags 
breaking down shapes acidified 
like the shells on the plastic plates 
down stairs gathering dust 
in the bar. 

Day 24 / Poem 24

Ode to Our Difficult Dog / Sarah Chestnut

-after Pablo Neruda

Luka,
soft ferocity,
your mystery contained
hair by hair, double
coat, waterproof. North
winds honed you
and from the furtiveness of frozen ground
your know-how rose, glacial, lit
from within. Over tundra
the miles
melted
beneath your ancestors.
Your tail is a curled flag
of happiness. That soil-brown
nose you run for,
jump for, dig for, that you jam
into the unmentionable
places. Your tail again:
the signature curve
of a question mark rising
from irresistible earth,
the rest of you, submerged.
Good boy, good Lou, you too
knew the wet, tight
safety of a mother’s womb
and grew solemnly singular
as a multiple, are growing
still into your fullness
in the wide and wonderful
womb of the world: wanderlust
they warned. Notoriously difficult
to train. O, overhauling
long-hauler, you came to us
on the eve of newness,
the old year ready
to blow its coat
and howl
a song of invitation.
Good dog, the cold bones
of mown grass
are your red
carpet. Queen Anne’s

lace, goldenrod, all gray-brown
tones blown and beckoning
beneath
your brilliant
paws. You shine
among the frost heaves,
beneath unsleeved
limbs of maple trees.
You are a lord
each morning, learning
what is good
in the land, what lingers,
what leans, who
is walking along
the rock wall,
who calls the stacked stones
home. Your eyes
ice blue, Paul Hollywood
blue, what-am-I-to-do blue.
Yours is the joy
of biting wind,
the good luck
of a second walk.
Mine, the joy
of cheeks aching
from grinning back
at your big, dumb
Siberian grin.

AN ODE ON GEORGE CLOONEY’S HAIR IN OUT OF SIGHT / Marnie Bullock Dresser

We’re past the Dr. Doug Ross Caesar cut, thank God,
by 1998, in the movie that helps reconcile me
to winter some years, that nightclub scene
with Detroit’s lights and snow coming down, but back
to his hair: a little bit of a pompadour on the top,
shorter on the sides but not shaved, some white
and gray interspersed with the black, general scruff
on his face but it’s his sideburns I’m most struck by
(not his eyebrows which are just always caterpillars):
longer than short, shorter than long, but medium
doesn’t cut it as a descriptor because there’s a stance
here, an attitude of coming down ¾ or possibly 4/5
the length of his ears, well below the concha,
past the tragus and antitragus and the heel,
just nudging south of the top of his lobe. How is it fair
that he’s so good looking even his ears
are attractive, though I suppose in the 25 years
since that movie all his cartilage has done
what cartilage does and elongated past the youthful perky
springy appendage stage. Still. In his prison garb
and escapee suits, those sideburns assert this guy
isn’t trying to draw attention to himself but he’s not
quite normal, not quite safe, might play rock-n-roll,
might be more than pretty, might save lives in Sudan.

Self-Portrait as Things I Found On the Ground / Jessie Lynn McMains

A HIGH VOLTAGE sign, shattered into HI V OLT

A red raffle ticket (KEEP THIS COUPON) initially purchased at Office Max

A rectangle torn from someone’s tax information, ink running and covered in mud

An empty 200ML bottle of Hennessy, next to a bunch of purple crocuses 

An empty, crushed package of Kools

A 5 card from an UNO deck, bent by rain

A cardboard tag that says United States Marine Corps

Four pages from Brian Doyle’s 2016 novel, Chicago

A Polaroid of two teenagers, one grinning, the other frowning, both wearing beanies

A sparkly blue flower sticker

A silver star sticker

Seven Mica Cap mushrooms, next to a large (Spear Thistle) pricker plant 

Part of a bird’s nest: tufts of feathers, bits of string, and tiny twigs, all woven together

Bits of a broken (robin’s egg) blue eggshell

A dead rodent, so flattened out and desiccated you can’t tell if it’s a mouse or a rat or a chipmunk, being devoured by tiny orange ants

Cut grass sprayed out by a lawnmower, landing in curlicues on the sidewalk, like cursive from an alien alphabet 

A chunk of metal rusted into lace, laid atop a stack of bricks 

A sidewalk date stamp from 1928

A shoe print embedded in cement, filled with white flower petals from an invasive tree

The dream poem  / Manthipe Moila

The sun filters into a room
and does not mean it. 
An elderly man’s profile is 
moulded into a statue of joy. 
A beloved tries to kill you 
and no one 
flinches. 

There is a snake on the ground, 
now two.
They multiply,
slither along the walls.
You
are jolted awake by the proximity
of their flickering tongues, 
only to find the same pretense 
of warmth, the same grinning 
stranger, your beloved’s wrath. 
There are animals writhing
on the floor. 

You are gated by the sleep
you had so desperately 
wanted. It loops its tail along 
your neck and pulls you into 
a familiar rhythm of awakening
to this torrid world.

Hot Sports Car / Kalliopy Paleos

A tiny, dark-purple Fiat in that side of the yard we never played in, sitting like an adventure in the jewel-green grass. The engine was in the back, not the front of the vehicle, violet vents in the hood gleaming in the sun. That was to let out the heat, our father had explained to us in much detail one morning before leaving. Later, if we peeked we could just glimpse the silvery  beast within that needed vents to survive. In the front compartment, a plastic bag of my father’s clothes smelling of gasoline. He’d persuaded my mother to keep the Fiat for him since it wouldn’t pass inspection. For a while it was part of their fights over the phone, he calling from pay phones she always said she would have traced to find out where he was. But she never did. Slowly the Fiat sank into the ground. 

For some reason we never played pretend car advertisement, never draped ourselves foolishly over the front of the car to look like we were having sex with the viewer. Funny, since young  girls always do stupid things like that, and we certainly did many other stupid things. It had to have been the emptiness of that front boot scared us off. Perfectly clean and empty but for those clothes he wasn’t missing. When he came one Saturday I asked if we should wash them, and he called to my mother to the window and yelled at her for leaving his clothes in the car like that. She disappeared inside, and after a few minutes came out the front door with a cardboard box, which she lay at his feet, saying Go to hell.

He laughed and laughed and slapped her backside before she could get away. In the box were all the drinking glasses I thought were lost, but there they all were, ringed with decals of red and green flowers, broken into hundreds of pieces. She grabbed my hand, and we went inside.  

The End of the Helensburgh Hotel / Elizabeth Walton

Take the tall glass of Jamesons the undrunk ice
pooled in Sunday morning slick, the beer still stands 

too sweet to stomach all flat inside the Schooner leering.
Are they pots or ponies here? I forget where the road has led, 

the city, the country, the too big terrain that had us compelled 
to attempt this gulf, this build up, the interminable wet season. So 

take the roses from the wall, swap out the lazy pastoralists resting
on carpet down the end of the Helensburgh Hotel hall,
the tender fall

                        -en petals like you 

and I who never belonged where 
water and shampoo slide down the
steaming glass, the black and white tiles,

the shower door that even now still cracks,
I never knew which way it bent, inward or outward

the opaque green glass as heavy as a three
Daquiri hangover, thicker than a wristband entrance

to your last show, I never know which way anything 
is supposed to go, directionless in the saddle, brok
-en and gone. We’re almost there

and never will know what might have happened 
had we not pushed beyond the wrong way

go back. The city limit sign,
the neon flashing exit

and you and I asleep
on borrowed 
pillows

Day 23 / Poem 23

Grandpa Hippie to His Neighbor / Sarah Chestnut

Get this, Bill. Listen. Other night, you know, full moon,
I was on the porch watching the lake for moose.
So still, only the silver floating of the moon’s rise—
I was thinking in haiku, dude. That kind of night.
Craig was in bed, but me, I was awake. Awake
in my soul, you know? I thought, this is Great Horned Lake,
in an owl moon glaw, so I let out the hoot—you know it?
You do. That’s it, that’s it. I tell you, man, I had to sit
down. This owl and me and the dropping wings of the pines
singing our questions to each other. I damn near cried.
It lasted—I don’t know—an hour maybe; the shadows
deepened. And get this—we met again next night
and the night after, like we were looking for each other.
Oh—oh—goddammit, Bill, we’re owl brothers!
&gt;&lt;&gt;&lt;&gt;&lt;&gt;&lt;
Full moon on the lake.
I am the owl, pine is owl.
Also, Bill is owl.

THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN GOOD NIGHT / Marnie Bullock Dresser

My father’s going gently, but my mother, she rages
against any hint of diminishment
beyond “I do forget things now and then.”
One tries to avoid seeing how one’s parent ages
as prophecy but Jesus Christ I’m alarmed,
I’m doing twenty puzzles every day
and cutting back prescriptions (polypharm-
acy being a risk factor). In any case,
here comes the green, the winter wheat, the rye,
alfalfa, deciduous out-leafing on the hillsides.
The prairie burns leave long swaths black except
for prickly pear, an ashy chartreuse surprise
for people who don’t know Wisconsin has
a desert, which is as sandy as my sidestep is inept.

The Roach’s Crumbs / Marshall Malin

We scramble, scatter
when the lights
enter a new phase 
every character 
scratches off fucks
from past diaries 
cursive dark, tight
littered with ire
someone lit candles
the books fell 
forward, the eyesight
lost in dimension
bellow, rambler, yell
scathe the sparse 
trees in a smoky 
farewell to harms, 
he’s in the attic, 
waits for your text
go, pull him out 
of the clutter 
get him a glass 
of cold water—

Side Effects / Jessie Lynn McMains

Mom I’m fine he says then vomits for the third time.

He has such bright colors in his head and I know this.

A yellow hummingbird, this one. With blonde tufts beginning

to nest in his armpits. Buzzing and darting about the house.

Can’t focus. Has to swallow the small white pills every day

then can’t eat. Then the red pain in his stomach and. Mom

I’m fine. Until he isn’t.

A cento because he went far away today / Manthipe Moila

(with lines from poems by Briton Szydloski, Jessie Lynn McMains, Marshall Malin, Sarah Chestnut, Kalliopy Paleos, Marnie Bullock Dresser, and Elizabeth Walton)

My loves are small
but growing golden.
They are stones I wish
to carry,
taking walks down
to the water
as the storefronts stare
with vacant eyes.

Nothing is chasing me;
this is just how I slipper
on and on, my hand
trembling in its reach.

I look for palm trees. I
am the rain, I love
all things.
Nothing’s chasing me –
I mean, no one is here

Appointment  / Kalliopy Paleos

                        I saw how the planets gathered
                        Like the leaves themselves
                        Turning in the wind.
                                           – Wallace Stevens

Just the other day as I rushed along the corridor for something so urgent, whatever it may have been, it occurred to me like an idea of my own except it was a pale blue drop of the Logos falling into the open rings of my skull, I realized: Not even one foot can you lift without the Lord to place down beside its sibling, or carry yourself aloft in arc as your body lands with it. What relief! Of course I kept on. The Logos doesn’t need us to slow down but like friends in our teens we clamber forth, knowing there is no stillness. I press my feet into the ground like soft faces that can read the waters and the soil, staring through to the core. Just as your poor human manuals try say, it gushes as though about some prom date, some bridegroom,  Every hair on your head is touched into life by the Lord. Not the errand, you see; it was the rushing broke the barrier. Keep going, you’ll make it.

Where my composting journey begins / Elizabeth Walton

Everyone buys in everything, everything. I order my counter top 
compost bins in three matching colours from Us & Them Them  

Un-Plastic My Home #MAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOP Fluff me up 
with European Tin. ICare. DoUCare? Night Crawlers really care

for the colour-matched canister worm food is in. It’s a breeze to go green 
in my kitchen, my compostable journey, my mission #MAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOP  

is a gift wrapped in sawdust, the worm with the bow is odour-free, convenient 
and aesthetically pleasing. An impactful step towards sustainable futures 

Tinstagram lowers my greenhouse emissions, enriching my soil, my pathway 
#MAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOP but who has dirt now unless buying it in from

the compost aisle at Ikea #MAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOP 
refill my  my stainless steel dug up and out of nutrient-rich bins 

#MAKEITSTOPMAKEITSTOP getting my dirt back plastic wrapped 
from the – what the? from that man who scraped the top soil 

off my bush block everyone everything everywhere
buys and buys in buys into every thing. 

Day 22 / Poem 22

“that we do all in our power to preserve our consolation“¹ / Sarah Chestnut

Red clover. Grape hyacinth. Bubblegum²
azalea. That they appear in jars and small³
tumblers all around. Eagles’ aerie atop⁴
a cell phone tower towering over⁵
the mini-golf course. That we stopped and watched⁶
a new branch soar in the clutch of talons⁷
to a place of belonging. Rolling waves⁸
of the sound, and the ferry, a cradle⁹
of intentions, rocking, rocking. Sweat¹⁰
on my palms proved again I love my life.¹¹
One man. Two children. A difficult¹²
dog and his glacial eyes. Sunset, sunrise.¹³

---

 ¹Julian of Norwich, Showings: The Long Text.
²See: I am God. See: I am in all things.
³See: I never remove my hands from my works
Nor ever shall without end. See: I guide.
⁵See: I ordain. How should anything be
⁶amiss? See: without voice and without
⁷opening lips, I form in the soul sayings.
⁸Precious plenty. Precious plenty. Sport, scorn,
⁹seriousness: the fiend is overcome!
¹⁰Are you well satisfied? I ask nothing
¹¹but that I may satisfy. I am he. I am
¹²he who is highest. I am he whom you love.
¹³I am goodness. I am gift. I am given.

FLOP / Marnie Bullock Dresser

At some point in the process of Gran’mommy dying,
I remembered the story of Eutychus falling asleep,
then falling out the window, three stories down,
being “picked up dead,” brought back to life
by the Apostle Paul and possibly forced to endure
more sermons, until dawn, or possibly, “meanwhile
they had taken the boy away alive and were not
a little comforted.” It has struck me as hilarious
ever since an evangelist named Denny described
the young man floating parchment airplanes
down to the ground and my friend Lilli saying
“Uterus” instead of “Eutychus.” How we howled.

So I remembered the story and brought it up
while totally forgetting I was related to people
who thought that really happened, who thought
God could bring Gran’mommy back to life
but hadn’t or wouldn’t. Someone was sobbing.
Someone said, “Oh Marn.” So. Ha ha in that
moment no one was even a little comforted.
I can’t remember why I thought they might be.

For Boylamayka, from Mathilde (with love) / Jessie Lynn McMains

once we were reckless in our pursuit of this love

in our pursuit of this, love we dismantled smoke

alarms in motel rooms almost got kicked out of

punk shows for drinking and making out in the

bathrooms, we loved to smoke in alleys drunk

on absinthe and the burlesque moon, love

mooned us drunk and we danced with punks

sang antifascist anthems with burlesque dancers

you with that low-end upright bass and me on

squeezebox, o bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao, love

once we ran all red lights and walked in the redwoods

scrawled our love on boxcars we broke stools

to get close to each other snuck fingers under

bar tables to touch the heat between each other’s

legs wore one another’s clothes (me in your white

t-shirts, you in my black lace) and stayed up too late

in so many kitchens cooking while we drank wrote

postcards to each other and signed our stage names, love,

i never imagined the shapes time would make us into

it changed our love but i wouldn’t want another’s ring or shard of

wineglass in my wedding shoe, you are my kitchen-dancer

music love, my staying up too late to make love somewhere

we’re still that reckless with passion and i wouldn’t have it

any other way, love.

Mountain / Manthipe Moila

To answer the question “What is 
your grandfather like?” 
one student says  “he is like 
a mountain.”
A mountain grandfather? 
I ask. He giggles and shakes his head 
no. The textbook furrows its brow, 
red ink threatens to splatter
the classroom walls;
the angry clock clicks its tongue 
and I smile something tight. 

I want to say
don’t listen to teacher – 
 your grandfather is not 
a strong grandfather. 

Your grandfather is, in fact, 
a mountain,  
a mountain grandfather.
And he is covered in cherry 
blossoms.
And we all 
look up at him 
in awe. 

Talking About Life and Belly Dancing About Architecture / Kalliopy Paleos

The ledge of my left hip glances down 
to construct the omi 
my caved-in center of gravity murmurs 
just picture the wineskin spilling the wine
the pelvic basin lowers coquettishly 
spill the wine
then right hip licks toward the floor
spill the wine, huzzah . . . 

I caress the earth’s joists through broken bones 
worship it atop steeples rising from this watery body 

The eaves of my shoulder blades whisper
We bless every cloud that has gathered
and dissipated, in all of time
then they raise the cracked beams 
of this ribcage, a holy tent

A corrupt heart loves only innocence
A slovenly heart loves only beauty
No such pavilions can withstand earth’s many winds

Dilapidated joints creaking, 
oh, let us dance as many times as 
all the leaves that have ever 
sprouted and curled away
My collapsed foot 
cries praises 
Lazarus, Lazarus!
from the floorboards
(Feet twirling near death
in arabesque do not fear 
biblical blueprints)

I embrace sweet, fragrant hills and splendid orchids 
I embrace empty, destroyed lots, stabbed alleyways

My sagging earlobes 
laugh their notes of peeling paint 
Please, as many head slides
as stones that have ever been cast
Elbows easing out serpents 
their flickering eyes
candlelit windows in vigil
We have many tongues
We are speaking

And if the body is so much inexplicable water
then transgression to not marvel 
at the vegetal reeds of light upon which it floats 
And we dare we plod along bragging 
that we are monuments needing nothing

Eden  / Elizabeth Walton

Eden sway 
low down
where the 
sense of a 
bay 
can drown 
the 
summer 
storm 
down
dow
do
d

Day 21 / Poem 21

Infinitive / Sarah Chestnut

To start to know
what to do: to attend:
to lift your glazed gaze
to movements of love
and to stay, to stay,
not to run to all
that could be next—
that, you see, would be
to water the seed
of deficiency;
to brew tea
but leave it
to grow cold,
then, hours later,
to pour it down
the indifferent
drain.
To pray to relinquish
fear. To ask for
an increase. To sit
at the table
and eat slowly
a steaming omelet.
To start to know
what to do. To do
what you have begun
to know.

DUMB / Marnie Bullock Dresser

The cast iron furnace door said hot don’t touch and that message was worming its way through my brain right when I reached out and touched it. It’s hard to type with one good left hand and a thumb and pinky on the right, but I managed. I got the paper turned in on time. When he saw my Band-Aid trio he asked if I was o.k. and I brought my fingers to my mouth and gestured cartoon words coming out and just shrugged. I didn’t know. I don’t know. Sometimes words fail me, especially in front of concern.

The Runaway Son of a Nuclear A-Bomb / Jessie Lynn McMains

Tell the guys I’m gonna be late for band practice.

That’s the last thing my uncle, age fifteen, said

before he died. From a freak fever. Meningitis. I

never met him. Twenty-five years later, when I

was fifteen, I picked up where he left off. Heard

Iggy and the Stooges, donned a black leather

jacket and an electric guitar. Became a street

cheetah, the family’s black sheep. I can’t know if he

was queer like me. I don’t know anything. But I see

the three of us—Iggy, my uncle, and me—as a strange

kind of trinity. All raised in Michigan, on rock’n’roll.

Suckled on pine trees, Frosted Flakes, exhaust fumes. We

all had the same disorder. Disease. Forgotten boys. Our

napalm hearts going bonkers every time we hear an electric guitar.

heart/break    / Manthipe Moila

*With a line from Lauren Shapiro’s “Humanization Squared” published in Easy Math 

you cackle with my friends on the balcony
while my heart has been left to dry in the sun 
all i can think to do is make biltong out of it 

i don’t know an aorta of a thing except 
that maybe i should suck out the blood 
that remains     get some salt          pepper
coriander      a saw          your arm 
is a great dowel     i’ll hang my toughening 
bits of muscle there as it dries further

sure, people are laughing at us now
but watch – they will break out into applause 
when i dole out the sliced bits anyone 
who is hungry enough to chew it out

*the line originally reads “My lungs have been left/ to dry in the sun.”

method for escaping fear and loving life / Kalliopy Paleos

reach into the ribcage 
and gently remove the heart
you didn’t know 
it was removable, did you
hold it in both palms
open the chambers
with both thumbs 
flesh
blood
clenching
release
gaze into the heart 
as into a zero
until you hear
a brook at the bottom
and stay to feel 
its breezes

then close the heart
as tenderly as you can
replace it in its wet socket
and carry on

Omicron  / Elizabeth Walton

acid throat 
swallowing 
nothing 

Omicron 

swollen tissues 
enlarge the soft 
lining of my nose 
my cerebral cortex 
throat and bones 
not my finest hour 
though 

Omicron 

the purple 
space inside 

the night 
is menacing 

Omicron 

ankle groin explode 
acid throat head 

explode shin sweat
choke explode sinus 
ear click explode 

Day 20 / Poem 20

Wilderness Words / Sarah Chestnut 

                                           (a found poem)

I never saw
a discontented
tree. They grip
the ground as though
they liked it—
though fast
rooted they travel
about as far as we
do. They go wandering
forth in all directions,
with every wind, going
and coming like
ourselves, traveling
with us around the sun
two million miles
a day and through
space heaven knows
how fast!
how far!

Lines drawn from John Muir

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY / Marnie Bullock Dresser

The game should be called Where and When Taken,
not just When Taken, but we love it: you get a picture,
a snapshot, a polaroid, a part of the historic record
and you have to pin the location and guess the year.
Sometimes they’re easy (if you know 90s lesbian hair
or what balconies look like in the French Quarter)
and sometimes they’re impossible. You can zoom in
to find clues. I look for palm trees, license plate shape,
women’s fashion, general automobile type, architecture.

Yesterday one of the shots was Melbourne 1901. I was
one year off and so was my husband, and we both
were pretty far away from Australia, almost
the exact same number of kilometers away: 16,901
(my husband) and 16,905 (me). Here’s what’s funny
and what makes this an anniversary poem:
I guessed London and he guessed Vancouver, which
are evidently equidistant from the Royal Exhibition Hall.

You take your massive differences and split them,
you do the math to find the complementary numbers
and you click beads on the abacus back and forth,
27 years so far, so good, right here, right now.

It Ended Bad, but I Loved What We Started / Marshall Malin

I haven’t spoken to you in a while, 

The quince trees bloom in late spring, 
five small white and pinkish flowers—

bees from anthers to stigma pollenate
—then, slowly, the fruit—hard green 

after summer becomes golden yellow;

The wooly texture of autumn’s harvest, 
the fallen, forgotten, fungi, bacteria, 

decays—and that’s the end of the fruit. 

I think what you might’ve laughed at—

A Memorial to a Memorial of a Tree / Jessie Lynn McMains

It was a really old tree. Like super old. A cottonwood.
It took root in 1666. It lived for over 260 years and grew to
be 176 feet tall—taller than the courthouse in this town—
and over 23 feet around. For a while it was the tallest tree
east of the Mississippi. Then it died. The Parks Commission
cut it down to 46 feet and preserved the still-tall stump as
a memorial to the original tree. They put a fence around
it and everything; to keep people from chipping off the bark.
Then someone burned it down. Now there’s just a wood
post there, with a photo of the half-tree, before it burned.
And some facts about its life. Every September, the orange-
yellow jewelweed grows up around.

Strange thing   / Manthipe Moila

Fishing on the Deck of the Twin-Engine Sport Fisherman / Kalliopy Paleos

If the white fiberglass is swept dry and spotless
you will feel the fine grain of the non-slip floor

        questioning continuously without smiling

underfoot, the little silver handles
swivel up so you can tug open the hatches

        The second card is the World
        paused in watchful assessment

the diesel engines below are polished and painted
the filters, pure white, changed often as fresh flowers

        Better get underway, says the World
        provisions packed and leave at dawn

The fighting chair is bolted down
two drink holders smell of crisp gin

        The High Priestess comes out upside-down
        hand pointing directly to the teak storage compartments

Sleek spearguns shining like her scepter, pointing north
You understand Her Majesty’s wishes
Turn the key and begin splitting the waters 

Day 19 / Poem 19

The Making of Things / Sarah Chestnut

1.
as if we planned    it each morning
he builds & lights a fire in the woodstove
I boil water    brew tea       set a tray:

two mugs      two spoons   honey pot
pitcher of cream         on the table
before the fire      we are silent

through these proceedings we are
gathering        sleep softened minds
to the new day          sorting words

as kindling is laid atop newspaper
log atop kindling      honey stick twisting
in the sweet amber               honey stick

aloft the black        tea blessing malty leaves

2.
his concern this morning is to convey
as fairly as possible how light
industry         how the making of things

is a rung on a ladder how this town
is a ladder how it is missing
how we are toppling without it

this town a missed-step from collapse

how he has seen this for years
how the powers that be (oh that they be)
chime     fut-ure    fut-ure   this is

progress this is the way things are going
the tourists want    brand recognition
the tourists must    be serviced motor oil
Starbucks    clean                    sheets Wi-fi

how can we ascend the ladder
how a town is a ladder
how every built thing is a reach

to bring God home
how no one is building by which

he means producing
Producers is the name        on the milk
carton           the brand I recognize

when I come here     a visitor

his concern is that I see how he sees
how his work             call it light industry
coffee table sofa table        dining table

console        cabinet           bed
is the missing rung of a ladder
is the work of making      God has always
traveled
                      up
        down
                          down

REMAINS / Marnie Bullock Dresser

For years after she died, I dreamed Granny on her front porch,
hands on her hips, furious no one visited anymore.
“We thought you were dead,” I always said. “Doesn’t matter,”
she answered, if she spoke at all. Or pretended she hadn’t heard.
Down the street, they’re tearing my high school down. All that’s
left today is the front façade, Potemkin, or a movie set,
a good one, where the brick building still bespeaks an architect
with skill and pride and a hankering for arches and parapets.
Her house is still intact, as is her church.
The church looks great: red brick, white trim, Epworth
United Methodist. Her house looks bad, the appraisal hurts,
it’s so low. As her dementia got worse and worse,
she drew little maps so she could still walk everywhere
she’d always walked, post office, hairdresser, grocery store.
Also lists on the cabinets, what was kept there. Her pumpkin torte
was so famous at potlucks, she brought recipe copies to share.

Once More, With Feeling / Marshall Malin

Escalate
involucral 
silliness
wake for 
pendular
mood swings
rested head 
smashed—
it’s okay 
now take 
your time 
little one 
pain passes
held warm 
pain passes
no harm 
take me 
to bed 
after I’ve 
smoked 
too much
while the
movie’s 
only half 
over when 
I want 
to be held
be with me
in the bed
even if you
don’t sleep 
I’ll know 
you’re there
wake up 
to your 
light snore 

Upon Finding Out the YMCA Where I Used to See All the Local Bands is Getting Torn Down / Jessie Lynn McMains

I wonder—where will my fourteen,
fifteen, sixteen year-old self go? She
used to have sanctuaries in other cities,
other parts of town, but those, too, have
been closed up and torn down. I can see
her there, in her thrifted plaid skirt
and Docs or Chucks, jacked up on coffee
and hoping someone would give her a sip
of their snuck-in drink or a hit of weed
to take the edge off. I can see her there,
with her ever-present notebook, scribbling
notes for her next zine. I can see her dancing,
awkward, arms and legs akimbo, trying
to slam, skank, no one joining in; somehow
still finding a boy to make out with in
the bathroom later. See her still feeling
awkward, out of place, an outcast among
the outcasts. That one time she decided
to dress emo—midwest ‘90s emo, baseball
tee and thick-framed glasses—and that was
the night she met her punk rock dream come
true. And that was the night she learned he
was into smack and it should have deterred
her, but it didn’t. See her a few months later
at Battle of the Bands. His band was one of
the battlers and she made flyers beforehand,
hoping, maybe, if he saw how much she cared
he’d care. But he cared more about drugs than
anyone else. And where will they all go? All those
old friends, crushes, lost to drugs or just to time?
The city says they have to tear it down. It’s derelict;
blue tiles falling from the empty pool, homeless
people squatting in the vacant SRO rooms left over
from when it was the Young Men’s Christian
Association. I say let them stay. Or where will my
memories squat when it goes away?

Wisdom  / Manthipe Moila

my wisdoms are trying to squeeze
one incisor out of the room, they 
are the mean girls of the mouth 
I fear that if I press hard enough 
against it, it will dislodge, 
and something feather-haired
 will come tumbling out.

how many teeth could I hold
in cubed hands? I’m not sure 
how I feel about homing 
another hole.dont say milk, 
it makes me think I’m delicious 
or leaking.

people here say I have a small face. 
I wonder how small it would be 
without all this wisdom. I want 
to pull them out myself 
but I don’t know how to break like that. 

the woman next to me for sure does. 
she is eyes-stitched-black
and sits on the golden throne
for the infirm or pregnant. She is like 
a queen of transfiguration 
and dark webbing. I tongue the back 
bottom row of teeth, press hard 
against the victim incisor.

you can’t sit here, not next to my
other crooked buildings. 
you can’t sit with us.

Athens, 1977 / Kalliopy Paleos

What was happening?
The parched street
the absolute sun
while Athens 
shutters closed
slept
Where were we going?
The parked Beetles 
pale green Citroën
electric wires on poles
the white curb
Why was she crying?
Holding hands to cross the street
my swinging pigtails
the mothers talking over our heads
none of us little girls talking 
to each other anymore
When would we get there?
Fresh white shoes
gather their first scratches
first grains of dust
settle into the leather
stepping on and on
Who was waiting for us?
Tiny black snails
are silver in the black pan
resting on the blue gas ring
Papou’s whitewashed terrace

Our mothers’ laughter over our heads
Sending us into the garden for figs

How to Grow a Weed / Elizabeth Walton

I see it’s time for you 
to grow a garden. You’ll grow mostly 
weeds, mostly weeds 
is what any soil will grow.

You can go against them,
see yourself pulling 
things up, throwing most things out, 
trying to reinvent time. Most of us do, 

most of the time. Or you could
learn to see things another way,
things we’ve been taught 
to throw out, grabbing the garbage bin

with both bare hands, filling it
with water, should you 
see some flowing
from any ordinary tap

lop the weeds in, seed heads and all
see them stew for a time, 
then pour the remains
on the garden. See what time can make 

from something discarded. See 
what time can make from nothing.
See what life can grow when you live like 
a sunflower, and bend towards the light 

Day 18 / Poem 18

Seeking/Speaking for God with Julian / Sarah Chestnut 

There God is, taking a deep breath
& blowing out all the candles
on all the cakes, saying
in the tenderest, tremulous corner
of God’s heart-mind

I wish to be seen, wish
they would see me—

what a wonder, their eyes:
retinal rods & cones & light light light;
image upon image upended, hand-standing
at the optic chiasm, cartwheeling
to completion onto the occipital
cortices. I wish it.

And I wish to be sought. There is play
at the heart of this. Oldest game—
& it’s a pity they tire so soon.
How glum to be the one
tucked into so long a waiting
you wonder if they called
it off, moved on to hopscotch
or lunch.

Hide & seek.
Hide 
Hide
Hi

I wish to be expected.
Seeing & seeking, fused: live wire
of a child at the window
demanding when when when
will they get here?
Soon. And now. And not for ages.

With that I wish more & most
to be trusted. Oh, the long,
slow fall into promised arms.

Which is a wish (cake?)
to be risked for.

POTLUCK / Marnie Bullock Dresser

“When preparing party sandwiches for freezing, spread first with butter (never salad dressing), then spread with the filling. No more soggy bread. Fresh vegetables and hard-boiled eggs do not freeze well.”   Bertie Ham in Treasured Recipes

228 pages of recipes and advice from Bertie’s friends, church ladies
and five men, but only two women I’m related to. I need to know
why my Uncle Earle’s not in there, though I would guess
he told Bertie no. He hated to share recipes and when coerced,
he’d leave out at least one ingredient or write TSP instead of TBSP, yes
that’s the kind of guy he was, but genuinely an amazing cook. I’ll tell you
one of his secrets:  water in a pie crust should be from just-melted ice.

Only one aunt, my great-aunt Wessie and her hot spiced punch
with cherry jello, pineapple juice, 15 cloves and firm instructions
to let it stand 12 hours before serving. These were Baptist women but
I wonder if a little fermentation happened overnight? Margaret Bullock
the only other relation here, my father’s mother, my Granny, a member
of Eppworth Methodist and older than Bertie by a good 15 years, so
I don’t know how they knew each other, but they recognized good food,
and Granny’s in there twice, neither one a recipe I’m familiar with.

Some recipes have quotes in italics before them, “Very Good and Moist,”
“The Easiest Cookie of All,” and with the Cherry Cheese Bars,
“This Was Served at Easton Florist Christmas Open House. So Many
Wanted the Recipe That Mrs. Easton Xeroxed Copies.” Be nice about
the capitalization. There’s a picture of the typesetter in front,
a woman whose sweetness I can vouch for, the picture in black & white
but I swear the blouse she’s wearing is red, and the computer
she’s typing on is adorably old. “This is a Favorite of our Club.”

“You Only Need One Recipe for Rolls. This is It!” Bertie’s Rolls.
No brag, just fact. My face flushes a little just thinking of them,
the perfect mix of sugar, salt, fat, and cinnamon. I hope heaven
is at least partly a potluck with these recipes and a few more.
I’d miss Joan’s meatloaf with the ketchup topping. I’d miss green beans
with bacon. But here in the treasury there are five ways to make
tuna casserole. Coffee cake from the dentist’s wife has two cups of sugar.

I have never once frozen party sandwiches but this cohort did
and maybe I should. Even though my mother isn’t in this book,
I thank God and her and all my matrilineal DNA, all the women I’m from,
I’ve always known better than to freeze a raw carrot or boiled egg.

Cinema Phantasma / Marshall Malin

Take the breath from flashbacks:
orange street lights, snowshine, 
waking up in a blizzard 
walking through the Heights. 
Lights flicker off, the bust 
above my apartment building 
disilluminated instantly—
scarce the pathways through 
snow—something followed 
me through electricity. 

there is something / Jessie Lynn McMains

Bird of Paradise  / Manthipe Moila

I had a dream that I broke 
my bird of paradise, its skin 
yellowing, stems hanging of 
their hinges. How do you 
even break a bird of paradise? 
Like an arm? Like breaking
apart an army of ams lifted 
in a sort of prayer? In the dream,
I spilled water into the dirt 
to save it. The water came 
through the drainage holes 
and gathered at my toes.
What is it I fear? Prayer? 
Becoming a bad mother? 
The water’s gathering, 
how it’s now too late to stop
the rot?

Early in the Morning / Kalliopy Paleos

The birds in the backyard 
are mewling at each other
and I claim, wrongly I know
to understand none of it
still, I listen
They repeat themselves
and I listen as many times 
as they speak
The words of the birds
insists the shell of air enclosing me,
are clear as day
why do you keep interrupting?

Day 17 / Poem 17

Praying with Julian² / Sarah Chestnut

Hand me yourself like a slipper shell,
like a blue bell, like an empty nest²
revealed & retrieved from winter limbs.

Hold yourself out, fragile
as snipped chives, warm egg, a pen,
a prize, an herb bouquet.³

Give me yourself, your hand, your gaze,
your breath, your blessing. My hunger
is a hive of want and need.⁴

Give me the hope of your hum,
all honeyglow and flowing.

Ancient⁶
Everlasting.⁷
Extendable⁸
Sweet⁹

¹For the highest form of prayer is the goodness of God, which comes
down to us to our humblest needs.
²God, of your goodness give me yourself, for you are enough for me
³& I can ask for nothing which is less which can pay you full worship.
⁴If I ask anything which is less, always I am in want
⁵but only in you do I have everything.
⁶Our natural will is to have God, & God’s will is to have us, & we can
never stop willing or loving until we possess him in fulness of joy.
⁷And there we can will no more, for it is his will that we be occupied in
knowing & loving until the time comes that we shall be filled full in
heaven.
⁸Therefore it pleases him that we seek him & honor him through
intermediaries, understanding, &
⁹knowing that he is the goodness of everything.

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS PASTORAL / Marnie Bullock Dresser

Ribbed undershirt, no bra, air you could swim in,
Cardinals cap turned backwards, alone,
listening to KMOX on the front porch
(air conditioner broken, cable too expensive),
a string of plastic lanterns looped over the shorting porch light,
tea candles in a metal pan becoming
a conflagration I made worse with Budweiser:

summer of forbidden love and loneliness,
I probably had tears in my eyes half the game, wanting
a game buddy, a boyfriend, a husband maybe, just anyone
to talk stats with, grab a beer for & then go at it hard
after the last out. Blistering line drive, diving catch, lit up scoreboard.

Even before that summer, well before Bull Durham, I connected
baseball and sex.
High school girlfriends and I argued endlessly in English class
about whose ass was finer, Tommy Herr or Ryne Sandberg, applying
rhetorical devices with lust in our hearts and As on our essays.

The 80s belonged to my ball team: three pennants, one series,
and a whole new way of playing, thank you Whitey Herzog,
gone home today. Get ‘em on, move ‘em over, bring ‘em home.
We stole more bases, turned more double plays,
and our uniforms were the same blue
the sky gets on a cloudless day right before twilight.

The longing to be back there right now—I can taste it, wanting
that un-aged body, sure, and warmer weather,
and even more so, a winning team,
but mostly, just a quiet evening to myself.

Zeno’s Painted Porch / Marshall Malin

And if I step out of the shade?
The sun would fall on you.
What if I split my face in half? 
One pupil would dilate. 

+

Man crawls from shipwreck
dripping seawater.

+

We conversed
but nothing I 
wrote down 
survived the 
years.
           You 
may have
destroyed 
it all, 
            or I 
might have. 
The only 
thing
constant 
is change. 
From where 
I sit, on my 
green hill 
before the 
river, I know 
I cannot 
change the 
past—

Both your houses / Manthipe Moila

I am foretold, twofold, burnt-
bridge and fervor

I am tempest, waterspout:
clean line roping sky 

I am furor, fever, rising
steam and scorch 

I am gale, guile, rock 
piercing footfall

I am thorn, scorn, 
no longer forlorn

I am moor, moon, 
thunder beneath sole,

pit, serrated, spit, slow
burn, 
            heat, churn, eye orbit 
cracking, sky cracking,
       skin cracking, 
            steep, stark, lone-shark 

I am precipice, barbed, 
hungry, 
hungry – 
I said I am hungry

I am yours now. You will be sorry. 

Making the Claim / Kalliopy Paleos

My father looked up from the burning blue tongues
of Heaven and let me know I was his
not a mistake or a she-bastard
(whomever else he may be visiting from there I do not know)
The soles of my feet
like faces bruised climbing the sharp streets
I had learned that the living 
are also condemned to wander
and I have, oh have I
But it is enough
to see his bronze face turn towards me
through the smoke of the censer
brown eyes focused and wet
a body in and of themselves

He says nothing
as they are often wont over there
May I tell your story? I ask
The head turns back
closed eyes
as if sunning himself 
in the pale light of his next ascent
a silent assent
though he knows it will hurt

I keep watching
sensing his faint, phlegmy cough lift away from him
[the cough of the beaten man]
[man beaten down by all his pleasures]
sense the soft heaven-flesh of his chest as when he was a fine young boy
see him safely enter the palace of forgiving

Omicron / Elizabeth Walton

for John and Pam

who walked 
the dog 

 Omicron 

On trend
though not 
on mend 

Omicron 

has the 
dog been 
fed 

Day 16 / Poem 16

Orthodoxy / Sarah Chestnut

Mine    the heresy of the pantheist not the deist
You are not far off     indifferent      but breath-close
You are the waking winter grass     the rake tines
enlivening     brash song of snowdrops in spring-winter

Hogwash       It’s mud season           Some mornings
my back bends me to the floor       Others                      a
lightness
sends me into lithe arias of praise            My heart
is winnowing wheat from chaff       My heart
is dancing hip-hop over sidewalk cracks    The cracks
are growing empty   The emptiness
grows and grows.                    You should see it overflowing!

Heresy-Pharisee        You are veiled &amp; unveiling
I know this
I want to tell you how easy it is to love your world
To love you as your world
To love your world
you      To say                     you are worthy
of the wood warbler the rose lily     the first bumble bee
to the honest upturned faces of the periwinkle
And by your own unveiling     the reciprocal is true:
each of these is worthy of You

I know the counter-witness Heedlessness           Truancy
Conflation      Inflation           It’s a bargain!

Present or absent       Lord     save us from our jargon

GREEN FROST / Marnie Bullock Dresser

      for Brian

Even when I was driving to work all the time, it was hard to spot:
the precise day the hills were no longer gray but just slightly,
in the right light, very, very pale green, a gray-green,
Russian olive, iceberg, dusty aqua, Pantone 5506. Snapping
a picture, next to impossible but I kept trying today, even though
I had a curbside pickup deadline to meet. Pull over, compose,
click, certain disappointment later when I scan the shots. The phrase
is from my father. I remember him hunting on Sundays when
we were all in the car together, going to church, early 1970s
it had to be, because my brother stopped going in high school.
It was almost always a little ahead or a little past, so now
I wonder if he ever did say, “There. That’s it. Today.” I just learned
he always thought rain drops hitting the sidewalk looked like
little ballerinas. This story from my brother, in town to visit
because Dad’s disappearing, little by little, faster, slower, faster,
and getting extra care from women smart enough to ask if
they should say the word “hospice” to him. Great question and
the answer is no. I say it better than I thought I would, but saying
good-bye when that time comes, soon apparently, will be hard
because I have been saying it for years as he’s faded and is now
essentially gone, the poet, the bear, the rock, the smartest man
who would tell me the precise moment is coming but isn’t here yet.

It’s Like Annie Wilkes and Norman Bates Living Together / Marshall Malin

The neighbors won’t stop fighting. 
It’s been three continuous days of 
screaming, and I wonder—do they 
work? How do they have energy
to wake up and go to sleep hoarse?
Desperate sobbing goes into typing
these lines. The thuds and thumps 
make me question if I should call 
the police. It’s all in Castellano, 
and I can’t understand the words. 
All I can understand is the pain, 
the anger, and I detest it. Correct me
if I’m wrong, but living like that 
isn’t worth it. Nothing is worth that.

Happenings / Jessie Lynn McMains

Parking lot. Cowboy with a hand in his velour sweatpants
moseyed up. Gas pump or happy to see me? I didn’t ask.

We posed for pictures near bins which read Trash Only
except in the photos it looked like they said Rash On.

The Kid crawls around, pinching and barking. His new
name, he says, is El SeaScab, the Lobster-Seal-Crab.

Once someone told me I was an old-school punk; later
that same night someone said I looked like Kate Hepburn.

I think I will have the Velvet Underground song “Heroin”
played at my funeral, mostly just to freak everyone out.

Sink  / Manthipe Moila

Fear is the blinking phone 
Red as a siren’s score.
It needs breathing, a recollection of 
Evenings gone right, a soothing salve
Nearby before the barrage begins. 
Don’t say you love me when you don’t.
Sure as a bird, you hammer in my head,

Lower your claws 
Into the earth of my skin. Like a good lover, you
Knock some sense into me. What is there to 
Esteem, right? Beautiful things don’t call out 

To themselves. A) My floor is lava or a 
Hole I keep falling into B) I am an unholy woman,
Eve with her wet and sour teeth C) I am a 
Spiraling leaf, rotting at the veins  D) am I 
Even trying, am I even trying  not to sink? 

Persistence of the Aging Mind / Kalliopy Paleos

After the Alocasia leaves / Elizabeth Walton

For Bronte Somerset

 Inside the bathroom 
of light where the Alocasia leaf 

brings alive its Araceae family 
dreams, the generous lime 

that found its way in,
a weed in a pot 

now lush and green
lifts into uncertainty 

the summer heat, the frizzle 
suckering in and bugs killing off 

the host. Am I the host, and are 
you too, our white hands aligned 

with the shower steam
the windows closed

so malice can’t come in? 
A gardener knows 

the bug 
or the leaf 

must go, and 
chops them both.

It’s a happiness thing, 
to lose the unexpected sting

cool in their trust
that no death 

is ever
the end

Day 15 / Poem 15

Walking with Lily / Sarah Chestnut

Those ripples on the water’s surface? Fairies.
And that’s Blossom Swing. Oh, that’s Water Way.
This is a restful place—that moss—fairy beds.
And these thorns: they break off and take as swords
into battle. There’s one they pass like a word
of might from king to king. The queen gets a dagger.
And when they’re born, they do not have wings.
Just wing buds, which grow—so they can swim
when they’re young, you know. And they speak
the speech of the land of the humans, but also
their own language. Kids learn it at school.
Something like a bird’s. This face in the rock wall,
this fragment, is Anointing Stone—takes sixty fairies
to lift and pour the water on the boy who has become
a man. Or the girl—you know, a woman.

JUNGIAN ARCHETYPE IN THE GLOAMING / Marnie Bullock Dresser

The yard the village wants to take a backhoe to
will have some new plantings tonight, or maybe
he’s gathering something for supper. He’s curved
like a capital C when he stands up, head, neck, back
swooping down to knees still half crouching. Alone,
he doesn’t know I’m watching from across the alley.
I’m hiding in my car to play a few puzzles and then
to meditate away from tax tension inside my house.
I’m halfway aware of him as I bring my awareness back
to my breath. Again and again. The cedar waving
in the wind absorbs me. And then again, he’s kneeling
to dig at or cut something. It goes in a plastic bag
just like the plastic bag I’m going to fill with rhubarb
when I’m done. The first spring pie. I can see that’s not
what he’s after, and really, he doesn’t seem like a pie guy.
The village is taking legal steps to condemn
his house. He slept in his car a lot this winter, somehow
survived a lot of sub-zero nights. The car is so full
of everything, he’s cleared just enough for a space shaped
exactly like him. Sometimes he gets pulled over for obstructed
views and people throw the term hoarder around like rice
at a wedding, like confetti, like rocks at a protest.
His house mess is larger than mine and more visible and
there are windows broken out, holes in the roof, steps
crumbled and unusable. It is a matter of degree. It is
the difference between a wise old man digging up
knowledge and a brand new crone procrastinating.
It is a sweet busyness as the sun goes down and all the green
branches turn black and stop waving because the wind died.

April Pastoral with Lighthouse and Longing / Jessie Lynn McMains

Spring now but doesn’t feel   muchlike   still

Amelia n’ Ashley show             up tie dye n’
bikes n’ we cycle miles            n’ miles        north to

th’ the lighthouse got a portable               radio

ducttaped to handle       bars playin’ New Rock
102.1 n’ we sing into the windalong n’

ride until our calf muscles scream     n’ burnin’

with the use n’ our cheeks     burnin’ pink from
Aprilbreeze n’ by the light      house we drop

our bikes n’        wander I’ve got      a cheap

camera n’ take   pictures of Ashleyn’Amelia
my friends’ dyed swirls of redorange n’ blue

th’ only bright                spots against the gray cloud

bank o’ sky n’                the tarnished                  nickel o’
th’ uglybeautiful lake n’ the gray     green o’ th’

grass’ notyet       n’ we take our shoes off n’

walk in the water n’ get                 the bottoms
of our jeanlegs wet             n’ it’s screamin’

cold            we don’t care          n’ before we

make the longride                      back we sit on th’
gray cement pier n’ dusk is       comin’ on          we

can see the lights o’ our nowhere    town glitter

n’ sudden I long to be   there when I’m in
it I wanna get                  gone but from this

distance even                 th’ awful ’s                gorgeous

Guess who I am  / Manthipe Moila

(prompt poem – The Rabbit Catcher by Sylvia Plath with the opening line It was a place of______) 

It was a place 
of sweet liquid 
that flooded out 
like a silicone
cup squeezed 
free of blood.

Its flesh 
demanded teeth, 
a tongue, 
a name for its 
seeds – small 
and black like 
pupils. The skin 
betrayed itself, 
breaking with the 
meerest pressure, 
erasing itself 
into its golden
garden. 

My love, 
sneering at 
the pretense 
of spoons 
takes an animal
bite out of 
the thing as 
though he were 
taking a
bite out of me. 

All of It / Kalliopy Paleos

I wish everyone would finally confess to being a poet so we could all go around talking in poems and nobody would have to be bored by sports. 
I wish I could afford to have someone read my dog’s thoughts because I have a number of questions for him and I think all
good animal psychics should have clients.
I wish, dear reader, for all the holiest dreams of your heart to come to life.|
I wish we were all friends again lounging on the porch with the dark peonies and wind chimes and nobody secretly planning anything sad.
I wish everything was beautifully made, especially sneakers because they all suck now.
I wish the whole family had gone to all those Karpathian weddings down in Baltimore and that we still saw each other every year.
I wish I was never horrible to people. It would be so much easier for all of us.
I wish nobody had any allergies and that we could all have cake all the time.
I wish you, dear reader, fine health and life in a civilization where the systems flourish for all.
I wish all of us were sharing the old house instead of fighting over it because now it’s empty and nobody’s giving in.
I wish those inventions all the kids are making at stem schools to save us from plastics would get a move on.
I wish you, dear reader, were here and we were talking all this over with warm cookies and cool milk.
I wish nobody felt the need to rape others or themselves even if they think it’s all just for fun.
I wish I were on the mind of the people I miss so deeply and that we could all go for a long walk on the Brockport canal. And then have a picnic.
I wish the medieval period were all finished. It’s taking way too long.
I wish to awaken long enough before dawn to settle in and enjoy it unfolding all the days I have left to do so.
I wish you a beautiful day, dear reader, since we likely won’t meet and all things are in always in motion.

Day 14 / Poem 14

Resurrection Plant / Sarah Chestnut

1.
Winter sun at noon. Low brightness, cold.
The tumbleweed rolls. Call forth this Rose
of Jericho like Lazurus: stone, rolled;
curled frond, unfurled. Cloth releasing
life, life. The rootless heart
so thirsty for all it knows
how to live without.

I unbind this knot, this spike moss,
place its dry bones on stones
in a shallow of wet. Together we commence
to open. To open is slow breathing,
is the pace of sun, glowing; moon, growing,
is a desert native, holding
the water’s edge.

2.
We are no longer friends,
but say peace, peace, and perhaps,
there is peace. Once, we opened our hands
to winter sun, unbinding every frond
so perfectly shaped to shield
the one it enfolds. Life is hold,
and release. Don’t you see?

Briefly, I was a small pool of stones
you paused in, spread, a gradation
of gray to brown to green.
I went dry. You curled in on yourself.
Rolled on.

IN TROUBLE / Marnie Bullock Dresser

Would I like squishing mud through my toes now?
Apparently not (since I avoid being barefoot in general)
but I did then, we did, down at The Pond,
and then pretended to be city girls who squealed
and screamed at how awful it was. Those sissies also hated
how you had to keep moving when you were swimming
or the baby bluegills would nip at your moles and freckles.
I bet those same girls would pay $30 for a fish pedicure
and a mud wrap. We should meet at a spa and make fun
of them again. We should meet anywhere and drink
some wine and hit on our childhood hits: painting rocks
(Gran’mommy was brilliant to occupy us that way,
water paints and a full driveway of gravel, all ours
for the whole afternoon). The time we built a rabbit trap
(just a quiet little spot a bunny might want to sleep).
Building the earth space station in my closet, with knobs
and lids and bottle caps we’d pilfered and worked into
small holes in a big cardboard box, all labeled with words
we didn’t understand like throttle and vector and thrust.
Our vaguely racist, all-purpose, magical chant:
Hiya tucky-tah, hoomy, yoomy, doo.
We almost never got in trouble. We were good girls, but
three times I remember stern looks, stern words, and once
yelling. We couldn’t be as quiet during the farm report
at noon as we were supposed to. One time I discovered
the ice in my tea (so sweet and cold it hurt your teeth)
made a noise as it was melting and I had to share the news.
The giggling came over us in waves and Gran’mommy frowned
(but Gran’daddy smiled, which is why we didn’t stop).
The time we stayed gone too long and Gran’mommy found us
at the end of an old road, watching crews work
on the interstate. We were hidden, spying, and sure we’d seen
one of them waving a gun.  We were warned about
girls being kidnapped and harmed. But the time I remember
the yelling was when Rob was chasing us around and around
and around the house, he was four, we were nine and ten
(the same year “Seasons in the Sun” came out, such a sad song)
and just did NOT want to play with him. At some point he
wasn’t behind us anymore and we were thrilled until
Gran’mommy came around the house carrying him, blood
all over both of them. He’d fallen and bit through his lip.
“Are you two happy now?” she shouted, angrier than I ever
had seen or would ever see her. Any other trouble
we got into later, she never knew about, or if she did,
our family code of silence kept her from saying a word.

                                        for Jode on her 60th birthday

“Marshall, Stop Being So Horny for the Truth, and Realize We’re All Liars” / Marshall Malin

Many small trees 
with yellow leaves
some fallen, car
parked, two blocks
walked, a cherry
latte, bad cheesecake—

+

through a steel tainted blue
understand, intervene, contradict
take the wind, brace the door 
completely surrounded

+

Taking the train 
seems idyllic 
I’m sullen, scars 
marked, blue rocks
tossed, at a very
haunted, sad rancho—

+

drink a coffee freshly brewed
what a terrible dream to have dreamed 
take it in, silent sky
delightful the morning

+

crunching under feet
the rain persists 
less pollen, mosquitos
dead, true flaws
lost—incendiary, 
daunted, dragged away—

+

sing a song I wrote for you
or a pair of covers you arranged 
contented grin, music fills, 
inspired the running!

Rereading Rilke’s Duino Elegies in April 2024 / Jessie Lynn McMains

Every angel is terrifying, and yet, alas
I can’t think of anything more terrifying than the times we’re living in.
I invoke you whenever someone says ‘don’t make this about you.’
I invoke you and it’s almost deadly, this trying not to
write about certain things. I once said I’d never write poems
about sex or politics, and yet— Don’t make this about you,
they say, and I never would, it would be appalling to do so,
but it’s perilous pretending I’m not affected. It’s not about
me but dear God. I think of the children. Think of the children
says everyone, but so many people don’t seem to care
unless it’s their own children. Don’t care when it’s brown
children half a world away, or a soldier-child self-immolating, or
a teen who’s Native, who’s queer and here. I think of my own
children, creation’s pampered favorites, in that right now,
they seem to be American white boys. But they’re both
neurodivergent and sex or gender-wise, I don’t know what they’ll
grow up to be. My husband doesn’t understand me.
Why I get so upset about children that aren’t mine. O God, all
children are mine. That’s what I feel when I look at them. I see
all children and I, moved by deep feeling, evaporate. I am
making this about me. Don’t make this about you, they say.
You’re not the mother of a murdered Oklahoma teen. You’re
not in Gaza. Don’t pretend it’s hard to be happy just because
—gestures vaguely at the world. That’s the thing. It’s not hard
to be happy. You’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole
springtime is filled with you. Happiness comes easy. It’s
sorrow that’s difficult. I don’t feel like I have the right to it. Considering—
Sometimes, though, I get so sad I think I’m dying. Not that I want to;
it’s that I think of the children, and then the littlest things set me off.
I weep and weep over everything. A painting of cormorants flying
over a lake at sunset. The lines around my eyes. Why am I crying?
Trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand. My life
is not perfect but I am alive and so are my children. If only we too
could discover a pure, contained, human place—I hear the rough
scrape of skateboard wheels on the sidewalk outside

Damage   / Manthipe Moila

Bitterness / Kalliopy Paleos

reaches cracked fingers through my lips
Scrapes out my stumbling tongue
Draws reams of dry, uncut silks
from my throat
Tugs out strings of pearls
given to someone more beautiful

Bitterness

Shoves that bony fist into my mouth
flings me onto the floor
rolling me till I puke up
that paper bag of candy
I never got,
Stamps its dead foot into my guts
until the stolen keys come
clanging onto the floor
Paints portrait after portrait
of all the stupid, stupid boys

Bitterness

Ravages my ears
screaming
You shall have no home

Whenever You’re Ready  / Elizabeth Walton

After the book by the same name by Trish Bolton

In Union Street I see 
so many friends, in your hands I see gritty nails
such hints where family can find a way 

an equal way, among those with few wrinkled
pretensions and in your face they see themselves, 
never too fast or slow to forget to recognise

the special light that flows from bending to pick the weeds
not pressured or hurried on to some other need, pressing 
your face your hands your pen, your friends 

all see the flowers you mend to the kerbside 
the verge between now and zen your light touched 
curled in the steps you take between the compost 

the seedlings of tomorrow call out to say 
hello my friend, how long it’s been. Will you sit with me, 
and drink this tea I made from rose geranium, 

share this Persian Love cake, the icing is fresh as it is 
sweet with lemon thyme and verbena. Whenever You’re 
Ready, you say, an invite to return to this centring space, 

down a laneway with palings and pickets and 
clinker bricks where it’s warm for a city bird 
to sit in the sun making notes on character. 

Day 13 / Poem 13

To the Small Dark Dot on My Hand / Sarah Chestnut

I do not know your name.
You came, sudden, silent, an unexpected
surfacing. Or, a coagulation
of all the worries that surf
the currents my skin contains.
Are you a surface stain? A buried grief,
unearthing itself? Or the late
cry of a forgotten pinch? Are you
the harbinger of doom – or is that
just me, and my rainy-day gloom?
O nameless new part of me, already
you have taught me I love my life,
want hands that are strong. See?
I am trying to believe you belong.

CARRY ME BACK TO OLD VIRGINNY / Marnie Bullock Dresser

tripped me up on the piano not because
of the offensive lyrics to which I was oblivious
but because I just never practiced.
“Do you ever play when you’re not here?”
was the first question my sweet teacher asked
one lesson. And then: “Shall we tell
your parents you’d like to stop?” No and yes,
thank-you, Mrs. McPherson. But I could read music
and thus got all the fun percussion in band
and orchestra. The boys could read the notes across
but I could read up and down. Timpani, xylophone,
marimba, temple blocks, vibraphone, glockenspiel.
I still wasn’t fantastic at practicing. At contest once
I got a pity pass. But I loved “Variations on
a Korean Folk Song” (which is probably appropriation)
and tried not to mess it up. When I told my band director
I was quitting to work more hours at the radio station,
he seemed wounded and concerned and touched
my shoulder in a very appropriate and gentle way
and I cried all the way the down the stairwell. If I could
zip back to Mrs. McPherson’s trailer with her shelves
full of little busts of composers, I would try to tell myself
“Don’t quit. You’ll regret this.” But I wouldn’t believe it
and I’d be right not to because it’s not entirely true.

Maybe If Jazz Tattooed Betty Boop on Its Chest / Marshall Malin

i. 

Approached from behind, the night
touched his shoulder. He turned, 
saw opulent clouds of il-ne-savait-pas-quoi—
forged in the passing noise, a name 
on his lips like honey, poised for fall
whispers out into the frigidity
visible breath, puffs of te quiero maybe
te amo, rush of water somewhere, 
cold beer and the smiling beard across 
from him, like a Magritte painting—
bright lights—he dropped the hand, 
and the whole human went with it. 
Let me tell you in two different tones
said the tree he peed on

ii.

A taxi to Buenos Aires
appearing slowly into 
city lights, the hotel
dimly lit, electric with 
something known but 
unspoken, it’s fast but 
peaceful in winter—
let’s share a cigarette, 
watch the city morning
the rush unfamiliar 
to us, let’s disentangle 
what’s between us 
at last, reconstruct from 
a limited city view—

iii.

No more lines to cross
but maybe, different lines, 
the gray defines itself 
as such—not black, not 
white, not the absolutes
we’ve been taught to 
crave, no, we exist
somewhere in the middle
spikes of pure yellow
skewering sheets of red
the gutter where you 
found me, with my ankle 
twisted, wasn’t that 
different from the home 
that raised me—loosened
the zippers of my jacket 
breathed your scent 
into my memory and 
took my time walking
despite the pain from 

iv. 

A rolling of thunder, a storm supreme, 
the city fills with rainwater from faraway lakes—
could this all just be a dream?
When what is is simply what it seems
when windows we’ve understood break,
a rolling of thunder, a storm supreme, 
comes to reinvent the way downstream, 
comes to push the city’s trash for keepsake—
could this all just be a dream?
This gathering of clouds seeks to redeem 
others, witnessing other worlds, all now awake—
a rolling of thunder, a storm supreme…
the orange, gray, blue, and violet color scheme,
a crash so violent the whole building shakes, 
could this all just be a dream?
Somewhere a wave caught us midstream, 
tossed us where we’ll heal from our aches, 
a rolling of thunder, a storm supreme,
could this all just be a dream? 

Deer Forest (Michigan Fairy Tales) / Jessie Lynn McMains

There were rituals. One was the red elephant with a trunk-key
which unlocked the stories. Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. You’d turn it
and the tinny voice would tell you the stories. The rituals

Mostly involved stories. The legend of the monkey bars
the red smell they left on your palms. The penny whistles

And the bullies. We jacked, we beanstalked. Fee fi fo fum
that was the way it was. We ran but also pinched and

Bruised and the pain was the way we told stories. There
was the witchhouse that explained the crack. And the rituals

Which explained the marks. What explained the poverty
but the pumpkins. I remember there was a time they cut

my wings. This may just be a story a beanstalk a penny
whistle. A forest full of deer and fairy tales.

Storm chaser  / Manthipe Moila

lightening belts the sky silver
i shake like a dog   
keep in my mind its hot spread
of welts

i want to retreat from this 
atmosphere, and for the drums 
to cool, quiet, the water 
to cease

my friend grins, all mist 
and hot air 
she wishes to charge 
through the rain, a bolt 
of flesh, and hair, and teeth
like the moon

i talk her down   she acquiesces
but i know that a woman like her  
can only be held for so long

one day she will be a tree
torn asunder, trembling arms
held up to the sky
the white flash before a burn

gone  

The Bones on the Trail / Kalliopy Paleos

My mother snaps the chicken bones
sucks out the salty marrow
her eyes glistening.
Delicious

Feet bruised, paper sandals on the concrete
I keep my pace
draw a bone like a stick from inside my body
let it fall to the concrete
It shatters like a dish
once belonging to a delicate set

My mother taught us to lift
the whole spine from the translucent fish
Eat the eyes too
silver lozenges disappear into her mouth
Wonderful

Eyes staring, burning with mascara
I keep my pace
reach inside for another long, warm bone
toss it into a low doorway
There’s a message inside smeared with marrow
I mustn’t read anymore

THE WATCHFUL WIFE  / Elizabeth Walton

After the novel by the same name, by Suzanne Leal

I worried, my love, would he 
take me up and into the world
or would he take me down, 
where the yard birds won’t fly 
and the light of all of my 
Gods blew away. 

I worried, too, about me, would I 
lift my love up and into the world,
would the love in my wings set him free?
Would I pin him to the heartbreak
of my destiny in loveless 
stone confines. 

The divinity shuttered inside of me, 
locked both of us out, eventually, 
and I worried then too, would my 
darkness overwhelm 
us when all we loved 
seemed lost

I refused to believe he could mislead me,
that either of his stone working hands
had done us in, I never could see 
any other way, than 
to straighten out lies 
and head for the truth. 

My love was never stronger 
than when rock was low, 
and he was alone, encaged. 
It was then that I knew in the
light of my fingertips 
that he was the man to trust. 

I felt his strength inside my bones 
until the light in the summer box 
on the window sill shone complete 
and faced down deceptions and ploys. I believed 
until the worst lie of all took up the key, opened the cage 
and set itself free in the clearest expanse of truth. 

Day 12 / Poem 12

Driving Home After the Eclipse, I Make Mental Notes / Sarah Chestnut

What if I forget how suddenly close the moon,
how ominous, fist-solid, unbothered by all this
fuss? I must remember how deep the shadows,
how you came alongside me, like a friend.
The sky a bright bruise and we mapped ourselves
to Jupiter, to Venus. Then, the unlookable light,
slivering open to an outpouring.

Remember the tail lights’ slow pour, like lava
down the mountain. Recollect how buoyant
you remained. You kept laughter, held it out,
like a moon stone. Do not forget the glow
of our faces, also moons, traveling an endless
road home.

And etch forever the silence that befell us
when the opossum, belonging in the dark,
could not account for the meteor of our car,
rocketing from nowhere. And your hand
in my hand as we wept for the loss.
Remember, O do not forget to remember,
the heartbeat in our clasped hands, the strong,
sorrowful pulse. Maybe mother’s. Maybe son’s.

SEASONAL / Marnie Bullock Dresser

Free-sewing because I’m in a hurry, one flower
looks more like four nice fingers and one rude one
or possibly something obscene with two round lower parts
and one longer protruding. So it will get layered,
hidden, safe. The flowers are for a wreath for my father’s
nursing home door. I try to switch them out seasonally,
but the leprechauns are still up, almost a month past
their holiday. Fortunately Orthodox Easter is in May
so the bright egg material is sort of still on time, but later
than I’d intended. I’ll go visit him tomorrow and hang it up.
People ask if he still knows me. I say I don’t test him.
I’ve been saying “Hi Dad, it’s Marn, your daughter,”
for years. Last week I got a big smile and a weird wave
(more like jazz hands, really, which he wouldn’t know)
and then he almost immediately turned away from me
and my mother and slept. I’m confident he wouldn’t know
whether the quilted circle on his door is early or late,
and honestly the eggs are kind of piled up and disguised
and who cares anyway? That I don’t meet my deadlines,
that I don’t visit as often as I should, that my heartbreak
moves as slow as a mill wheel on a frozen stream
that will melt as spring arrives so the wooden circle turns
faster and faster, though creaking, and power is
provided to—to what? To do what? To move things along
in a downward spiral or a slight plateau or a goddamned straight line that just won’t stop.

But Sweetheart, You’re Going to Make a Lot of Mistakes / Marshall Malin

Swift through tundra-fed caribou, 
a fox’s short muzzle, a wolverine’s 
scavenging,
                     we went awondering—
wrong and waning, gelid, nebulous,
about what we wanted and what not.
It was a cold song sung, but I felt 
the rising 
                     sun beneath ice sheets.
Earth turned, I became fireweed
and bearberry. 
                            Carbon from peat. 
The great gray owl and the elk 
have told me their tales, revealed 
to me what it means to be animal—|I flew south and in so doing broke
what had been frozen. I lost limbs
in a forest fire. 
                              Most importantly, 
I left you behind, how you sniveled. 
Once warm, I materialized anew, 
this time, not so much physically as 
left in an idea of an idea, 
                                               mountains
where people of great intellect go to 
die—and I learned of less frost. 
Shivering, shivering and coughing,
nature progressed past me until I was 
a petrified something—
                                               less human 
than I had been, more impervious, 
more powerful than ever, unmovable. 

Noir / Jessie Lynn McMains

The butch detective limps into a bar and sits down. It’s the kind of bar where everyone in it has seen better days, in the kind of neighborhood that has seen better days. The kind of bar where the pimps’ fur coats have mange and the barmaid could be 25 or 60. Still beautiful, but unraveling, rough-voiced, crow’s-feet, pockmarks on her cheeks; could be from age, could be from living fast and hard too young. The kind of neighborhood where the streets are pockmarked with potholes, where the trash piles up in mounds. Mattresses, bicycles, baby carriages. Where half the houses are boarded up and the youth correctional facility ain’t too far away. The kind of bar where the tracks are so close that every passing freight makes the iron-barred windows rattle and shake. The butch detective orders a tonic and lime, no gin. She stopped drinking when— The same night she stopped carrying a gun. She sips the thick bubbles, citrus and quinine, and looks at the wall behind the cash register. There are years worth of memorial folders taped up there, regulars at the bar who died too young or just died; the paper yellowed now from age and smoke, though smoking hasn’t been legal in any bar for over a decade. The butch detective wonders what it would be like to be known so well they’d paste the notice of your death up on the wall. She wishes she had a cigarette. Scratches her belly; feels an ache in her bad leg that means tomorrow it’s going to rain. One of the regulars puts a song on the jukebox, some scratchy old country tune of lost dogs, lost loves, loss. The barmaid sings along, rough and scratchy, but yes, she really is quite beautiful. The butch detective remembers a woman, the one with the miles-long legs and murderous eyes, the one that was Trouble with a capital T. The late afternoon sun hits the ruined cream brick of the boarded-up house across the street, bounces back into the bar, refracts through the butch detective’s drink. Dames, she thinks, and the shadows are deep and dark enough to drown in.

Awake  / Manthipe Moila

The water seethes and inside 
the teapot cloves soften. 
I skirt the patch of floor where
I broke glass, turn off the heat
to keep the whistling away, a sharp trill
that would wake my neighbour. 

The tea smells like an unwritten 
thing, spills out from the cup
to hang in the air. It has the same 
register as the light rain that once 
caressed  my face and body awake – 

I stopped writing poetry because 
I was afraid of the glass beneath 
my feet, the blood it might draw.  

Alone at the Dinner Party / Kalliopy Paleos

I am sitting among the upright bodies
The bodies are talking
The ball of my head swivels north and south
              also talking
Between the bodies
The breath and words interlock 
The signals vibrating outward 
              along the throat from their vocal chords
              strike the tiny machines of my ear
Light is a gong striking the pupil
            quivering the bodies into view, then
            fading until the next gong sparks again
When they are all gone
            and I also am gone
the tingling around
my living skin
        vanishes
        and so do I 

The first light of autumn  / Elizabeth Walton

For Sean Burke

After, The Winter Sun Says Fight by 
Peter Gizzi

Does the morning light
say much at all these days these

numbers use a different part 
of my brain not like 
the musician I knew 
who was good at maths these 
numbers must mean something

to someone like him 
though I was mostly good 
at English not maths 
musicians just

the same. The light sweat
pierces my skin the hot
now cold now heat
hears its way in
side the spaces between

the small coloured cells
my crochet hat hot
cold
hot

forgotten logs
gone old in the 
cinder box the flame
wears out 
the tangled pin prick 
nerve pain
pinned to piano chords
unplayed untouched
unheard of 
these days

the wind whistles 
through the soft light
seeking its 
landing place in 
your softly 
interwoven hands

Day 11 / Poem 11

Experience of the Eclipse as a Patchwork Garment / Sarah Chestnut 

-a conversational cento with Yehuda Amichai

Hello sun, we’ll be thinking about you a lot today / The
precision
of pain / The kings held the Nets to 77 / and the blurriness of
joy / What time is totality? / Can I have the Cheeze-Its / Can
I have the Cheeze-Its / I’m thinking how precise people are
when they describe / It’s physics / their pain in the doctor’s
office / A single

hole will show it to you / What time is totality? / Even those
who haven’t learned / We’re going to take a group photo / to
read
or write are precise / It has to be about language /This one’s
a throbbing pain, that one’s a wrenching pain / I’m going to
get my
jacket / this one gnaws, that one burns / It’s getting darker /

this is a sharp pain and that – a dull one / We are losing
our vocabulary / Right here. Precisely here, yes, yes /
It’s eerie / It’s a different quality of light /Joy blurs everything
/
I’d love for you to translate a poem from Hungarian / I’ve
heard people say after nights of love and feasting, / I can just

look at the screen /“It was great, I was in seventh heaven.” /
There is so much light /Even the spaceman who floated
in outer space / What time is totality? / tethered to a
spaceship
could only say / Look how sharp the shadows are / “Great.
Wonderful. I have no words.”/ You can look with your naked
eye / The blurriness of joy / when it’s at totality / What time

is totality? / and the precision of pain / It’s Jupiter / It’s Venus
/ Oh oh oh / Keep your glasses on! / I want / Whoa / Keep
you glasses on! / Oh oh / Okay okay! / to describe / Take
them off now! / with a sharp pain’s precision / This was worth
the drive / This was worth the drive / happiness / Look at the
kids / They

are jumping around! / Put your glasses / and blurry joy / back
on / Put them on! / Wow / Wow / It was a crown / What was
the red spot / Flare—that was a solar flare / I have no words
/ The next is in 20 years / Maybe I’ll make it / I’ll be 82 / So
big / So powerful / Maybe you’ll watch it with your grandkids /
You

can actually look into it / The blurriness of joy / The moon felt
so close / That was the dark side of the moon /and the
precision of pain / Right before, right after – the shadows –
did you see them? / I learned to speak / Like desert sand /
among the pains / Right at the edge of totality / The sky was
the place to focus though …

WALKING ON BROKEN JADEITE / Marnie Bullock Dresser

“Dishes don’t think. Dishes don’t judge. Dishes cannot make meaning—only people can.”
KC Davis How to Keep House While Drowning

My Granny’s coleslaw bowl did not appreciate
being used by a possum as a nest or losing its gold
etching to various dishwashers and microwaves
over the years and certainly the shards’ mood
wasn’t happy as they got dustpanned into the trash.
Her jello bowl lasted longer but it is also gone.
I halfway do believe my ancestors’ essence lives on
in my dishes, tables, bookcase, hutch and I wish
I weren’t so certain the judgey lot I come from
keeps a heavenly tally of all my fuckups.
When my mother’s sure her parents are rolling
over in their graves, I tell her “they have all the wisdom
of the ages available to them. I’m sure they’re fine”
which obviously, depending, I might or might not mean.

Migrations / Marshall Malin

There’s a man from Belarus
praising Milei. A teenager 
from the US Midwest, doing 
algebra homework. A Peruvian 
woman looking after her daughter. 
There’s a pair of guys arguing 
though I can’t understand
because I’m listening for
my name, which the girl at 
the visa counter pronounces
perfectly. I had seen her Monday, 
and she told me how to stay. 
All the people wait and stare 
at their cell phones. I can’t bring
myself to distraction. I stare
at everything that moves. 
The couple didn’t bring their 
original birth certificates.
An older Venezuelan man
speaks gracefully. The pair of 
New Yorkers with their kid 
are pushy and entitled. I’m 
sat in the non-silence of this 
newly-painted-white office.
Just listening for my name. 
Nearly tapping my shoes together
wishing to go home. It’s still 
early, I haven’t had my coffee yet. 
She gives me the piece of paper
I think is saving my life. I walk 
a dozen blocks to make the taxi 
not so expensive. I breathe out. 
It’s getting colder, and my hoodie 
has the smell from last year’s 
bonfires. I’ll wash it soon and
hang it to dry on my balcony—

Somewhere in San Francisco / Jessie Lynn McMains

not sure where exactly but I knew
I was in love with you for the second
maybe third time. We were two
maybe three beers into the night and you
were on some mystic shit about drinking
you could take or leave drugs the same.
The only things you still craved were love
and smoke. You lit a cigarette and I coulda
said some shit about love and smoke.
How they were near invisible but could
still seep in and fill you up. But what did
I know. I was in love. Thinking how many
times had I already fallen in love in San
Francisco. I was in love with San Francisco.
Anchor Steam and skid row free blow Mission
burritos. Jazz Amnesia City Lights Tenderloin
yes and that bright-painted wall in the alley
next to Vesuvio. Silhouetting Indian warrior
cocked. And the salt the salt the salt. Hated
the gentrification but loved that city. And you.
And I knew you were gonna break my heart.
Or my heart was gonna break over you but
it would be my own fault. I thought of that Elliott
Smith song. I thought of the fortune teller who
said Girl you’re gonna have more heartbreak
than most. Maybe you’ve got bad juju
and people hurt you. Or maybe it’s just you’re
a writer extra-sensitive and you take things
harder than you should. You were still talking
and shut up shut up I should’ve said you’re gonna
break my heart and it won’t even be your fault. My
heart breaks all the time. I wanted to say heart
break was my praxis. How else to crack open
and let all that fog and smoke all that doomed love.
All that terrible light in.

Body  / Manthipe Moila

The swimming instructor says 
I need more power in the thighs,
less bend at the knee.  I am to use 
my serrated arms to cut through
the water 이렇게, like this, 
she shows me, slicing the air. 

Does a knife bend? she half asks, 
half waters, her foggy face too 
close to mine. I shake my head,
struggle to keep the water from 
dragging me with its infinite arm.

When she asks me why I am so
tense lately, I want to say because 
my love went back home, 
his is an arm that bends
me into a sweet song, makes
something buoyant out of me.
I want to say because
right now my body must be 
the heaviest thing in the world.  

Final Wishes / Kalliopy Paleos

Let’s see . . . what to do with what-was-me when I become a blackening husk of ice, the mind expired like a filet mignon forgotten in the fridge, my soul sparkling like a bottle of fizzy water out into foreverland . . . 

I’ve wanted a winding sheet for slipping easy into the water, my slim trajectory in the air a glottal stop, the same swish as my father’s one perfect footstep that teenage day he snuck up behind me and, with a shove of laughter, sent me spiraling off the tuna tower, forty feet into the waves.

By that summer no one thought I would ever learn to swim. During lessons at the beach I blew bubbles and paddled, my hands underwater firmly grasping the sand and sharp shells below. My father had called down from the railing: Go on, kid. Swim! 

Now, he should have had a winding sheet, slicing the water fresh and clean. But his shell was slipped in a suit, that suit into a luxurious casket, that casket onto a plane. In his homeland they had to force it into the narrow churchyard slip. Looking down from a few feet above, I worried: How will you break free?

Yes, I shall arrange it. Scattering my thoughtless flesh down into the blue, to unravel among the picnic debris and bags sunken by thieves on the run, engagement rings hurled in rage, starfish suctioning themselves in circles, continents of plastic. No-longer-me cold and black, swimming.

Omicron  / Elizabeth Walton

– for Bronte Somerset

the petals

fall 

to the 

chopping board 

unnoticed 

Day 10 / Poem 10

Principle of Displacement / Sarah Chestnut

PLANTS THAT LOOK LIKE THEIR NAMES SOUND / Marnie Bullock Dresser

Well, actually, so far I’ve only thought of loblolly pines,
poofier than a pine tree oughta, especially in spring,
and very southern, like, the sweet tea of trees.

Maybe daisy.  Super cute. Or gorse. Sounds painful. Is.

I used to think I could tell what soap a man used before
he got close enough for me to sniff him and figure out
how right I was. I will say Ivory (the bar, not the dish one) is easy
to spot and Dial, well—that’s what my Dad used and Jason Kelce
apparently so maybe I’ll take it up again, this nose-tarot, this
useless fortune-telling. Do they even make Ivory Soap any more?
My husband broke my habit of buying it because it was a scam,
he said, it floats because they whip it up. There’s less soap. But
I miss the smell. When two become one they give up some
favorites. My parents are the only people I know of whom
that saying’s true: they became one so long ago. Friends 72 years,
married 65 and counting, Mom’s caught Dad’s dementia.

Their first house had crepe myrtle by the front door, elegant
and homey all at once. Safe next to a foundation. Old-school.

It Isn’t the Rush of Remembering / Marshall Malin

Argent apperception
flurry of micropixels
sinkholes that never 
stop filling, scratch
of an eternal back itch—

let me to the betterment
be of use—to these great
friends of mine, to these
neverending heroes: 

Amygdala, the Great,
ever foresting for tears.

Hippocampus, the Dying, 
disappearing in greenery. 

Plasticity, the Unmovable, 
a cold, dark, damp weight. 

Cortex, the Constant, 
instant, sour taste of argyle.

Dopamine, the Underdog, 
you’re working your way up, kiddo. 

Serotonin, the Absent, 
escaping in the night. 

and Oxytocin, the Confused, 
trust a turbine blade. 

Haunted Garden  / Jessie Lynn McMains

My mother once told me
those tiny white butterflies

the ones with the little black
dots on their wings

were spirits. She said they
were the souls of our dear

departed come to say hello
then goodbye again. Used to be

I only saw a few each year
then I started gardening. They

proliferate among the greens.
Whenever I pluck a few leaves

of kale or collard for my supper
dozens upon dozens of the powdery

white (blue too sometimes) things fly
up flutter around my hands and face

sometimes land on me. Hello I say.
Hello Uncle, Great-Grandfather, Cousin

Twice Removed. I think sometimes
of removing the eggs nestled in

the stalks before they hatch. Before
the caterpillars eat holes in the leaves

of collard and kale. Then I don’t. These
ghosts are hungry but they’re mine.

Twin / Manthipe Moila

(The poem is written as a palimpsest writing activity out of the book The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop by Diane Lockward. It models the poem “More Lies” by Karin Gottshall which is used as the prompt poem for this writing activity) 

Sometimes I say that I have an identical twin
because I want to know what I am like. 

I’ve wanted her since the time I read that
poem about a twin who was struck 

and her sister who felt immediately
the moment of impact. Today, for example

my fingers, slick with olive oil and conditioner,
rip through the tangles in my hair. 

The floor is feathered with broken pieces 
and my back slopes to reach a particularly 

difficult web. Is she more patient than I 
though her hair is thicker? 

April is beginning to shed its arctic robe,
and I wish to shed as decidedly as a snake 

or a tarantula. I like plants that fluff up 
like afro hair – reminders that I too appear 

in nature. I like the word cuticle, how
Black women online talk about it as though 

it were a flap. I imagine my twin smiling, 
and slick with oil and conditioner herself,

loosening the tangles from my hair, 
slapping away my ravenous fingers and 

saying in a stern voice “be more 
gentle with yourself. ”

Spring Morning / Kalliopy Paleos

Bluebird flits
its cry a silver disc flashing in the leaves
Young girl’s caw
flit through the casement and away

These sticks are making me… / Elizabeth Walton

These days the thinned out trees are the new consciousness of
lands and leaves left shot and shy of what once

was here, but no-one remembers what it used to be.
A wide girth has become a rarity, a bird in a tree rarer still

but no one wants the tube stock donated by canopy-seeking-Councils,
growing greening cooling neighbourhoods, freeing

this air-conned community. There are no twisted sticks now, no
turning away. Read the landscape, read the trees, read the soil read

tea leaves, read whatever it takes to read what a land is
capable of when the whole world is not yet the city of some man’s

concrete dreams. Any tree thicker than the arm is rare, but then again
my arms, my hide, my skin are all thick now. I’m dead

serious this is no intellectual gag, the angophoras were replaced with a
smouldering polystyrene burger joint on the outskirts

of Cementville, no twisting, no turning or making a eulogy, a whole ecology put
together with disordered chaos rides roughshod all over this place. Over anywhere

really, now each of us look for our place of last resort, a safe space to shelter in situ in case
of emergency (aka a dog park), a bundled rough line in collage that draws the truth ever so

tenderly. Do you believe there’s a place
for the thirteen insects left? This parasympathetic preying

mantis, (the last of its kind) seeks
a home for twiggy limbs.

Day 9 / Poem 9

Letter to __________. / Sarah Chestnut 

I will not say you broke my heart. No. But
the deep, interior bruise
                         (the doctor hands me
the word contusion),
              the rupture, has been slow-healing,
has been hard to regard as true injury—

one in need of light loads, hot water bottle,
that offensive, bossy, four-letter word: SLOW.

Could be it was my ego that took the blow.

Go on then. Break that, break it clean and good.
Let me learn all the ways I am not needed.
Let me behold my glorious gratuity.

Could be we both carried gifts the other
could not yet receive.
                                     Now I am all belief:
x-ray of my daughter’s breastbone proved
the tumbling blow on the trampoline, breathless
confusion, the crumple inward, is no break,

but contusion.
Contusion.

INHERITANCE / Marnie Bullock Dresser

I wonder if the top-shelf whiskey was
still there. I don’t mean quality. Granma hid it
from her father, W.R. Floyd, who lived there after
his wife died. He was an Irish storyteller, a horse-
trader (not thief I don’t think) who died before I was born.
The whiskey allegedly medicinal, measured out
in tablespoons. “Grain for food, not alcohol”
asserted the bumper sticker on her plum-colored Ford).
Granma was a charter member of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union. All her descendents drink.
When I leaned at twilight against the asparagus ferns
(corralled by rusty wire and leaning fence posts)
and saw Granma in the window doing dishes,
and heard her working her Methodist hymns
(“O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” was a favorite)
had she taken a little toot? Did she measure any more?

Dangerous (1935) / Marshall Malin

He inspired me to write new songs,
bit of jazz, bit of blues, a hint of Latin chord progressions
mostly influenced by Fiona Apple—
I had to take care of him when he broke his leg, 
and I fell further in love than 
watching him sing a song on my guitar named Ghost—
but we’re just Don and Joyce now
he’s not engaged to anyone, and I’m not secretly married.
I still feel jinxed. That’s the one constant
Bette Davis and I share. I’m so afraid I’ll mess it all up, 
the show will fail, and I’ll go running back to no husband. 

If I don’t go outside today, I never will. / Jessie Lynn McMains

Body  / Manthipe Moila

There is always a reason to hate the body: a decolletage
 marked with protruding bones, slow growing hair, hips 
that curve inward as though to obey some law of your 
svelte anatomy. 

In primary school you sat clad in a bikini
at your friend’s home. Her mother complemented your 
figure then turned to her daughter to say, in a voice
that rang clear as windchimes,  “Why can’t you look like 
that?” 

You were so pleased someone called you beautiful 
that the look of sadness on your friend’s face
didn’t even register. 

Lunch By Myself on the Empty Terrace / Kalliopy Paleos

The cat threshes dust with a curled paw
yawns, checks on other affairs:
sunlight
chair legs
scent of fresh-roasted octopus

Still, the dazed grasshopper shall not escape
still within reach
its body covered in the saliva of the cat
wings broken from the clasp of its teeth 
in spasms and accidental leaps
tumbling like one scattered leaf in the rain

intensity / Briton Szydloski

there’s an intensity

that burns within me

like cigarette ashes

gunmetal smears

in circular formation

forming on my skin

polka dots seared

from the inside out

…

i wish for this fire to keep burning

i will shine brighter

than you know

one day

one day

you’ll see what i mean.

Gently go the whispered lines / Elizabeth Walton

After The Ache of Marriage BY Denise Levertov

The ache of phoning
click to ear, to listen,   
to speak, and not be    
heard how hard it hurts

the searching connection
now bound by distance, to listen,   
to chat was once compelling

it’s useless, now, yet we   
carry on trying
for sounds, unheard   
down the crackle, the old telephone

lines, crossed out by scammers
and spammers who make elders
anxious
to take
a call

on mobile, or landline,
hearing aids in
replacing the din with   
crackling

silence.

Day 8 / Poem 8

This is just to say / Sarah Chestnut

it is a wonder the pace
            at which you turn

the page. I have
            always been slow

at books. Look—
            I am a marvel

to you as you are to me
            for our irreconcilable

speeds. What can I say
            for myself? I turn

each word in my mouth
            like a bean seed

in the palm; chard, mesclun,
            basil too, felt, held,

then bedded into soil
            I pray is good. See?

I read with my mouth
            moving. Each word

is a garden of song,
            rooting. Salads, salsas,

ratatouille sprouting
            on the tongue.

Words are not—
            you know this—

mere gossamer thought,
            but gurgle, heft, hum,

each a thing-in-itself; substance;
            sinew; fruit—no: plum.

PANINI GENERATION / Marnie Bullock Dresser

Making a regular sandwich is challenging
enough but this machine’s hot and
it leaves marks.  You have to push down
so hard. Taking care of children
and parents is one of the features
of middle age, one of the blessings,
one
of
the
hardest
things
I’ve
ever
had
to
do
but how lucky am I to have both parents alive
to have a son who was not easy to conceive
survive to adulthood and really just thrive.
Sourdough bread from a pandemic
starter, sliced roast beef from a steer
I probably drove by, Pleasant Ridge Reserve
cheese sliding down those channels like a race.

Blood and River, Bone and Rock / Marshall Malin

Hysterical from blood on concrete, 
then recovered, he covered the gash 
in my wrist from the fire escape.

Driving to the Berkshires one night,
he swerved to miss a doe on the road
and held me back with his hand. 

—

Same air, same water, same house, 
we are each other and opposite.
We share unspoken roughnesses 
and an undetermined delicacy:

his body a broken temple for god, 
quick to anger, a child of land, 
he and his daughter sing together; 

my body tattooed, my face pierced, 
a child of water, I listen cognizant, 
conceited where I change and don’t.

—

Merrybells on spring break, fall sun, 
fall the day, phobias inside and out 
carve paths through thicket and thorn, 
help me cross the creek’s deep water—

steady the heat, open me the field
of invariable green, wind sways 
all trees, driving down highways
windows down with Led Zeppelin—

the maples and red spruce upstate, 
change colors and don’t, fall leaves
and doesn’t, the promise of autumn, 
I bake you spiced pumpkin pies—

we collect icicles, shovel snow, 
he slowly roasts the pork while I
dip ladyfingers into espresso—
watch a movie, heated by fire.

—

Cacophonous distance quieted us enough 
through storm, grace—gradually, the 
spokes grabbed us to do us harm—rain,
grass, thunder claps, sky colored violent 
orange, dark blue-gray—offered silence. 
Escape shaped us differently, he for house, 
I for field. Our ideal natures lost for views 
of hospital interiors, books that haunt—
we lost the creek, what I find in rivers,
what he finds scarcely, knoll gone too, 
someone else’s house where we play—
divinity in the unvisitable wildnesses
we harness among cedar trees, vines—
what I’ve known too: uprooting extends
courtesies of reinvention among new 
flowers. If only he were brave enough like
facing the lightning, breaking his ankle
against a tree, running as fast as he could.

Spring Ephemerals / Jessie Lynn McMains

I. Skunk Cabbage

Capable of blooming early in the season
There are things difficult to admit
It produces its own heat
Not just that I’m scared of what people will think
A metabolic process called thermogenesis
But I can’t even find the right words
Gets its name from the odor it emits
This is the scent of me
To attract pollinators
In the night, emanating from
It smells skunk-like or of rotting meat
I mean at night I’m
The scent is strongest
In bed I’m
When the plant is bruised or injured

II. Red Trillium

Having these dreams where
Latin name: Trillium erectum L
I run into someone from my past
Other names include: Red Wakerobin, Stinking Benjamin
And we fuck and I want to stress
Bethroot, Wet Dog Trillium
These aren’t people I was ever into
Wet Dog Wakerobin, Purple Trillium, Purple
In that way but it’s hot it’s so hot we create our own heat
Wakerobin, Wake robin
I’ve heard sex dreams aren’t really about sex
Stinking Willie, Birthwort
Maybe I just want to make them part of me

In Wisconsin, Shooting Stars are generally found
Half the things that turn me on aren’t sexual but sensual
Growing in moist meadows, prairies, and open woods
Like the sound of a train in the night outside like
Other names for Shooting Star
The way Tom Verlaine plays guitar
Eastern Shooting Star, American cowslip
Daffodils in the rain a glass of half-decent wine
Roosterheads and Prairie pointers
Moist earth in the woods and on the prairies I am

The “Jack,” or spadix sits in a tubular base with a hood
I think again of the worms
The spadix is light green to reddish green
Their wild writhing on the rainsoaked sidewalks
The spathe is light green to purplish green and often dotted
Pink tongues twisting in ecstatic death-dance
With white or purplish stripes
And the springmud
However, not all flowers are “Jacks”
The wet squelch of it
Initially Jack-in-the-pulpits produce only male flowers but
I open up I let it all in I let it
In later years, Jack-in-the-pulpits may have male flowers
I get so full up that I need a release
On top and female flowers (“Jills”) on the bottom

I get full up with sound and sight and
Rue-anemone is a native plant that grows
It has to come
4”-8” tall
Out somehow
Rue-anemone flowers are pink to white in color
If I can’t get it down in a poem
The flower has 5-10 petal-like sepals and
I need to cum
Blooms mid-April to mid-May
If I can’t do either one I cry
Other names: Wind Flower
And the wind is my lover and I

(all text in italics from the Authentic Wisconsin website, Ephemerals page)

Writing poetry is hARd  / Manthipe Moila

All who I have for sick company: 
an island of blank and torn pages 
upon a perpetual floor;
my footfall; the ringing of the fridge, 
its strum long and tangible and reaching,
as though to vine itself between the
folds of my mind. 

My words are sticky like honeycomb 
that will not leave my fingers.
I walk in circles, blow on them, even 
lick trying to get them to settle 
onto a lined world; disperse 
the pages, in desperation, with 
my feet, hoping to archipelago 
my way to something coherent.

The floor is somehow bigger now, 
filled with islet upon islet of need.
I want to stick each land mass to 
my downy skin in memoriam 
of language and sanity. 

These were trees once. 
Can’t I sap them into syntax, 
carve stanzas onto dead and live
bark? Could they sing for me? 
Just once? My fingers are so sticky, 
so heavy with dread.

The Angel Is Always Waiting to Conference With Me / Kalliopy Paleos

Just this black morning
the angel was asking me
how much longer I planned 
on puking up microbeads  
of household innocence

Later I ask this question
of the breakfast dishes
But like seashells in the undertow
they only clatter 
Wash me, wash me, wash me
My ancestors cluck their tongues
Unless the water lights your hands on fire
they won’t really be clean

Rolling its eyes, the angel hands me clothes 
turns the key in the ignition 
Throughout the day the angel carries my books
watches me swallow ball after ball after ball 
of thinking
Lethal as Easter peeps
it mutters

My lips, disembodied,
covered in flecks of food coloring
smile very hard at everyone

As dusk hits, the angel perches on my pillow 
like a sweet dog waiting to be taken out
Asks me if I wouldn’t prefer 
to live without pretending – 
from this very moment, perhaps
or today or this week or soon

Later when it’s blue out
I rock up and down on bewildered, 
mewling thighs
until the shadow-man gives me permission to stop
Then I am allowed to slurp up any sleep I can 
from his pool of snoring

Bored out of its mind, the angel is watching
but faithfully preparing its usual notes for me
ready to converse again when dawn returns
You need not help the unkind women in the kitchen
You need not lament the dead if they have been evil
Do awaken dear, yours is not the true obedience

Omicron  / Elizabeth Walton

Would the 
phone 
ring 

if someone 
plugged 
it in 

if anyone 
remembered 
to answer 
it 

to find 
it on 
the floor 

what conversations 
are for would 

it ring 

Day 7 / Poem 7

Forgiveness Comes in Slant / Sarah Chestnut

Some days, though we cannot forgive, forgiveness
comes in. Then, a woman will raise her arms
as if slipping on her new best dress,
and sway like a budding tree, wind-charmed.
Some days, though we are songless, joy
springs on us, silent as a springtime tick
to a dog’s coat. Then a man and his boy
whoop and holler and chase, sure and quick.
Laugh with us now. The red scooter lives
again! The mailman has his window down:
AC/DC and dog biscuits. April gives
out party bags of weather; sunbathe or drown,
it’s still light out. Inside, sudden strength
to scrub the tub tile-length by tile-length.

MOMENT OF GRACE / Marnie Bullock Dresser

The headache that you self-imposed
(from one too many, o.k., more
like four or five too many or
from hiking your shoulders due north)

will be gone soon. Ibuprofen,
good coffee, sugar, local cream.
Your tremor made a tiny tsunami
which now looks like watercolor on linen.

The Rewrite / Marshall Malin

This anxiety I know well—
smoke streams carve afterimages
like cave paintings behind my eyes—
no harm ever came to the boy—
solid and unmoving, the forests
we burn or chop down will seek 
recompense when we are machine 
and slowly returning to the earth—
glass table, breakable, as are the 
coffee mugs I’ve left lying about—
past as concept: creation, reclamation.
Not so much twist as reinvent.
Gun me around a receipt and redden
my pockets with blood money.
No, I don’t want your bribery—

Eclipse Sonnet with Conspiracy Theory / Jessie Lynn McMains

I step out the front door; my neighbor accosts me. Ready for the turmoil comin’
after the eighth? After the eclipse? I say. Yeah. You hear about the quake in
New York? Tells me the path of the eclipse and the path of the fault line intersect,
and we should expect tremors, storms, and God knows what to roll across the U.S.
Continues: Have you noticed the birds? They’ve been strange. He saw a few geese
fly north, then east, then south. Like they didn’t know where they were goin’. I watch
two ducks fly overhead. West, then south, their wings lit rosegold by the sunset. Of course
the birds are acting strange. It’s spring! Do any of us know where we’re going? His theory
sounds conspiracy to me, but I’m no better. For a while I was afraid to do anything during
Mercury Retrograde—which we’re also in the midst of, these days. Well, whatever happens,
I say, I hope it’s not too bad. Hope for the best, he says. Prepare for the worst. But that’s
always. Every day, we all look for reasons why awful things occur. But mostly shit just
happens, and there is no reason, none we can pin on the sky. Nothing but chaos in the
movements of celestial objects, nothing but springtime in the flight paths of birds.

A Love Poem  / Manthipe Moila

A-love-poem

Meeting Friends Again / Kalliopy Paleos

Oh, now I know who we will be
when we sit down together 
at the table of light
heiresses of the constellations
heartbeats scattering fine-grade
carats of benevolence
faces studded with reflections
comets swirling around our heads
as we chit-chat about all that happened

a stolen bag of candy
broken shoes soaked with sludge and still the bus wouldn’t come
tight slap on the face from the mother’s soft palm
tarnished blade of the pirate striking deep
drifting faces emitting their tinny laughter
aging eyes sinking deeper, absorbing less light each day

Yes, now I see it
golden ringlets piled high
waltzing with the Logos
black-spun curls in spiralling clouds
extracting life from every stone
Happy I shall be
for you and your riches
and I too am wealthy
We have inherited 
the blood of the ages 
ancient and fresh like shy rain on the minarets
gamboling from palace to palace
lying in the fountains staring up at the sun

I am an heiress and I have all of it
You are an heiress and you have all of it
We shall meet at the banquet
Everyone will be there
Glimmering

Duty and other loves / Elizabeth Walton

My politic impertinent
pro humanity, morality,

a luxury, my gratitude
removed, resistance
defeated my love

lies listening,
bleeds, questioning

alone
in air
unbreathing

Day 6 / Poem 6

K is for Palm / Sarah Chestnut

Hold out your hand,
palm up. That’s right,
receptive. Never mind
how cracked or clammy.
Never mind the loose threads
of your fraying sleeve,
quickened beat
in those exposed blue veins.

This is a brief exercise

in belief.
Here is a kiss you can
carry, soft as a kitten,
light as a kite.
The tug will be yours
to tether.
The tenderness
also, a tether.

Keep the cup of your palm,
this beggar’s bowl,
open. Here, a koala
dope-slow on eucalyptus.
Here, a kingfisher, female,
wearing unusual brightness.
Kittiwake, blessing
with red, webbed feet
the hill of your hand
as if it were one of those four
blessed cliffs. Kestrel,
kingsnake, Kilimanjaro, kiwi,
kiwi bird, kingdoms,
kingdoms,
a key.

Do you feel the weight
of your god-likeness yet?

Can you believe
each of these is kindling,
these kin, and your palm,
a hollowed-out home
for the flame?

Cry I have become like wineskin
in the smoke, cry kindness,
cry comfort,
cry come.

Stake choked hope
and openness on flames
that don’t consume.
All palms, all kith and kinder—

do you believe?—
were made and given
to bloom.

ANOTHER POEM YOU COULD PUT ON A COASTER / Marnie Bullock Dresser

Some days are just like this: glitches
pile up, the cup of trembling spills,
the calm you had erupts, it itches.
Is there a meditation pill?

No, just this: several candles, soft,
some Lena Horne with a vinyl scratch,
red wine with notes that glance and lift,
in a glass that sings with your touch.

The Ooey-Gooey Bad-Thought Sonnet / Marshall Malin

I have ghost limbs in a hall of mirrors, 
moths dancing around empty, absent flames—
Mantra: I am no one. I am nothing. 
Take that out. No, don’t. It’s close to the truth. 
Or it had been at some point in my life. 
At least seventy-five percent of mine 
was spent worrying about what I thought. 
Break his leg. Throw him under the 2 train.
I’m evil and vicious, savior and saint. 
Tongues lapping from every direction
prove me write, prove me right, prove me written. 
There’s no proverb. There’s no aphorism. 
Living inside of my own head made me 
miserable. When I got out, I found peace. 

In Wonderland / Jessie Lynn McMains

Woke before eight to the house rattling. Thought it was an earthquake; it was a jackhammer. They’ve dug a big hole in the street to replace a water pipe. When I see the white and marmalade cat that wanders the neighborhood, I follow. Together, we clamber down. Well, the cat clambers. I fall. There’s nothing much down there but sewer stench and layers of sediment. And flowers—the early violets, the white ones with faint purple-blue veins. Little sparks in the dark. Curiouser and curiouser. I could, perhaps, keep falling forever. But it begins to rain, and the work crew returns to fill the hole in, so Cat and I, we climb back up. I’m home in time for tea. Darjeeling, or oolong, doesn’t much matter. The water is thick, with a rusty tang.

Flick  / Manthipe Moila

It is in the moving of the tongue,
the pressing against the cave of 
the body, its fleshy peaks and ridges. 

It wants a sweat at the temples,
underneath the breasts, and beads 
behind the knees of salted want. 

This work is a form of water, 
is the lapping up of need;
is need to release out of the body

and  into the wilderness 
of the small city abode 
the truth of coming apart.  

Vessel / Kalliopy Paleos

Oh, dear little boat
wooden crate of flesh
I am not of the Earth
skin thickening
fingertips like grapes
until I lie down in you\
and float supine in the dark water
looping and dipping
until the ocean’s many muscular arms
come for me
every winking curl and ridge of its surface
penetrating the grainy planks 
with its own message:
here, nodding plants . . .
become stinging salt . . . 
meaning equals propulsion . . . 

I am colorless in the blue night
I shall be colorless at dawn
and I shall float, as now, swinging 
like a summer girl on a high swing
skirt flapping open
uttering one cry of laughter
before I must disembark
and shimmer into the ether again
waiting for the next keel to surface

Repentance / Briton Szydloski

full enrapture

a holy rapture

of butterflies

concocting escape plans

from their cocoons

monarch migration

across coasts

…

i feel as if i’m

twisting in rounds

circular time frames

physical backtracking

on my progress

….

i see texts

and voicemails

they have the same

rhythm of humor

and timbre of voice

as i

but i’m not him anymore

please stop holding on

…

i’m about to reach out

with full arms

to grab you

if i could

give you the world

i would

you don’t deserve it

but i love you too much

to not give you

what you should have

had the chance to give me

…

i came to the funeral

you still claimed me

as your own

polish dynasty

living only through

name

i came to the wedding

and i felt your eyes

they were bursting

at the seams

with potential energy

that just turned kinetic

retina supernova

in the name of missed time

you came to his birthday

pissing matches are fun

when you forget

what you’re stepping in

the shit doesn’t smell bad

if you’re use to the stink

…

i’ve gone a third

of my life without you

it’s miniscule to me though

but it would have meant everything

to you

i feel selfish

for not allowing you

to have that time

…

to wait

to train

to learn

how to be a father

takes diligence and time

i ripped the experience

from your heart

and i spit on it

i disrespected you

on purpose

how you had done

without knowing

im so sorry

Omicron / Elizabeth Walton

Day 5 / Poem 5

P is for Mouth / Sarah Chestnut

In the old script, each letter was a thing, speaking the song
of itself in hieroglyph. P is for mouth. You’d assume the look
of an O shaped for feasting, singing, parting for a long,
inquiring, pleasing kiss. I tell you this: it has the look
of an ear, listening. P is for mouth, is for ear, is for poem,
opening. Mouth is for poem, is for ear, is for sounding
out the long dialogue at the heart of things. I open
my mouth and pant the old poet sings, sighing his longing
in, out. The world is a song, a singing, a search for one
who hears. The mouth is a smile, a frown, a low hum,
fastening word to body to breath to send it all soaring.
P is for mouth, is for poem, is for ear, hearing. And adoring.

56-POINT OFF-WHITE MATTE LOVE / Marnie Bullock Dresser

I will gladly be your coaster, baby.
Mess me up, I won’t mind. Soak me through.
When every single thing you own is sweaty,
I’ll be the king of mops so you can do
your wet sloppy jitterbug everywhere.
And if you need a buffer, a cushion
between the fragile glass of your heart and
the hard cold bar top of the world, I’m there.
I know you count on me. I do not need
explicit gratitude. No “thanks” required.
If I were a coat, I’d throw myself in the mud
for you to walk on. I’d dance on a highwire.
Take a bullet. Someday I’ll take my turn.
For now, you have my paper-thick devotion.

Not an Anniversary / Marshall Malin

Welts, little welts
ironic laughs
daring, pleading

staircase guilt
when fist through 
plaster, breaks

I would have, 
had I known, 
killed the man—

gone gone gone
in earth I plan 
to avoid

welcome sank
lips colored
a small fever 

uncovered now
waiting to chill
the expectant 

parent—I’ll never
have children, 
never teach iambs 

the way I might 
have, the way I 
still could—

little walker, galaxies
rely on your twinkle
your sass and words

go down and heal 
your welts, little 
welts—

Kurt Cobain at the Kenosha Public Museum / Jessie Lynn McMains

I recognize him immediately. It’s impossible not to. He’s frozen at

twenty-seven, young and drug-skinny, greasy strands of bleached

hair sticking out from beneath his beanie. I’m just gonna let him be,

not say anything, but we wind up next to each other at the wetlands

exhibit. We’re both mesmerized by the taxidermied critters, these

animals memorialized far past their natural lives. “I always liked

raccoons,” he says. “Envied their masks.” I point at the red-winged

blackbird. “I’ve written so many poems about them,” I say. “Sometimes

I wish I could appreciate them for what they are, rather than the

meaning I make from them.” He nods. “Once it starts, I don’t know

if you can turn that poetic apparatus off,” he says. “It got to the point

where my identity was so fractured, I wasn’t sure what was me

and what was metaphor. Was I Frances Farmer, or a heart-shaped

box, or just a kid from Aberdeen?” We wander over to the display

of art by school-aged kids. There are drawings of families, homages

to Dalí, a portrait of Shrek in a Sailor Moon costume. There’s a series

of pictures from one sixth grade class, renditions of packages from

their favorite sweets and drinks. Nerds, Nestle Crunch, Sunkist,

Sour Patch. Sixth grade, the same age I was when Kurt died, and

all the things I started getting into at that age, way worse than

sugary treats. “These kids made art out of candy,” he says. “It’s

like the purest thing. I hope they don’t grow up too fast. Let them

stay this way, for just a while longer.” I look over at Kurt. He’s not

haunted or hunched inward. He’s not writing song lyrics in his head.

He’s smiling like a kid with a box of candy. I think he’s just happy.

Untitled / Manthipe Moila

a knot you just untangled 
reroutes itself into chaos,

the chocolate you licked
off just-washed hands

tastes of the confusion
of soap. ink stains all 

your territories into the 
wrong shape and you 

are left to wonder what 
we do all of this for

think of the strands you have saved 
the cocoa and sugar on your fingers

think of yourself as being without 
territories: borderless, stained,

steeped, even, in something like joy

Opening the Gate / Kalliopy Paleos

                                        The Soul selects her own Society –
                                        Then – shuts the Door – 
                                                                 – Emily Dickinson

You’ve come! You’ve come at last, I see you there
with flowers spilling from your mouth, and gifts
divine, your laughter trilling in my ear
my mind a puppy yipping as it lifts

I open doors and pouring out sweet milk
can see the crows and starlings in your gaze
Come sit, dear guest! I’ve waited and been sick
Now laughter rains in feathers down your face

Oh please don’t say you cannot stay too long
I made some plans and thought that we could talk
I’ve only noticed now your hands are stone
You’re cold, gone pale, your sparrows jump and squawk

Dear friend, sweet friend, don’t fear your caves of grief
Just listen! You can rest with me – it’s safe

Rolly Polly / Briton Szydloski

almost like

days of summer

time slipping

grains under my fingernails

memories i can’t let go of

i feel like time

is best summed up

in a polaroid picture

small

slightly nostalgic

and always developing

you can’t go back

but you can ponder

ruminate

sit in those emotions

like your dads favorite recliner

feel comfortable in my mind

like an old friend

…

i used to play with rolly pollies

as a kid

i miss those days.

i can’t recall when they ended.

These sticks are making me… / Elizabeth Walton

These days the thinned out trees are the new consciousness of
lands and leaves left shot and shy of what once

was here, but no-one remembers what it used to be.
A wide girth has become a rarity, a bird in a tree rarer still

but no one wants the tube stock donated by canopy-seeking-Councils,
growing greening cooling neighbourhoods, freeing

this air-conned community. There are no twisted sticks now, no
turning away. Read the landscape, read the trees, read the soil read

tea leaves, read whatever it takes to read what a land is
capable of when the whole world is not yet the city of some man&#39;s

concrete dreams. Any tree thicker than the arm is rare, but then again
my arms, my hide, my skin are all thick now. I’m dead

serious this is no intellectual gag, the angophoras were replaced with a
smouldering polystyrene burger joint on the outskirts

of Cementville, no twisting, no turning or making a eulogy, a whole ecology put
together with disordered chaos rides roughshod all over this place. Over anywhere

really, now each of us look for our place of last resort, a safe space to shelter in situ in case
of emergency (aka a dog park), a bundled rough line in collage that draws the truth ever so

tenderly. Do you believe there&#39;s a place
for the thirteen insects left? This parasympathetic preying

mantis, (the last of its kind) seeks
a home for twiggy limbs.

Day 4 / Poem 4

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Light / Sarah Chestnut

Every year we are
witness to it, bystanders
who cannot help take in
how the world

rises millimeter by tender
millimeter, how the light
opens her arms wide
again, enfolding more
and more hours, like
all her children’s friends.

We say yes, we attest
to the arresting zing
of new greens. How
could we not? Who
would clap gloved hands
over wind-bitten ears to mute
the blackbird’s song?

Still, sometimes happiness
gathers in the trunk
of the throat like a choked
cry; ground waters
of thankfulness thaw
to mud, then freeze again;
hope sweats itself out
on heavy palms, like
the fear-throb that comes
when you spot coyotes
parallel in the woods,
watching you.

Yes, the love we claim
to have for the world
is as small and fraught
and fitful as the best of us.

To love the growing light
we must learn to love growth
which is both a hard-won
ring, thickening us,
and a promise more

goodbyes than the voice
can bear will come.
Let us go on then, soberly enough,
to exclaim this and every
brightening day,
Welcome! Welcome!
We’re so glad you’ve come.

(In conversation with Mary Oliver’s
“Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness”

GETTING MY MOTHER’S PILLS TOGETHER WHILE WATCHING SPRING BAKING CHAMPIONSHIP / Marnie Bullock Dresser

The challenge is that polypharmacy isn’t pretty but
the right pillbox forms a coherent base, four chambers
(morning, midday, supper, bedtime) in each one,
and for height, a tiered container, four rows of eight slots
(a month’s worth of pillboxes, labeled 1-31, plus one extra)
on which, inexplicably, my mother has pasted
several years’ worth of “I Voted” stickers, including today’s,
which looks more like Memorial Day, but some years that counts
for spring though clearly red-white-and-blue is summery.

The twist is that refilling prescriptions may involve a change
of manufacturer or lot so whereas the capsule used to be
a lovely cream color, it is now rust (better for fall decorating),
and the statin is now simply white instead of butter yellow.

But in the end, the variety of shapes and sizes of white pills
forms a nice nest for the lilac multivitamin, and oh—
the two-tone pill (rapid release and long-acting)
is the brightest blue on one side, a sunny April sky,
and white on the other, one perfect ovoid cloud.

I win, I win, I get to come back in 30 days and do it all again.

Autumn in April / Marshall Malin

The sun has been setting sooner lately—
mosquitos and their dengue will leave, 

the scorpions will be less active. 
On a cold morning walk with Cappuccino,

I thought about gifting my boyfriend’s 
mom a plum. I thought about eating one 

myself. Why wouldn’t I, if I like them? 
Rosemary garlic bread, roasted chicken, 

mashed sweet potatoes, roasted squash, 
butter-basted green beans and cheesecake, 

all for my friends, my boyfriend’s family—
I let to myself days uninterrupted by meals.

Coffee, spliffs, this is my fifth bong rip 
of the day, let the thoughts slow, slow—

and if I want to walk? Want to cook for 
myself? What if I want to sink my teeth

—mine—into the plum I bought for 
someone else? The window’s open, the sun 

shines. I feel nineteen again, again reading 
Carl Phillips’ first book, underlining parts of

Aurora Leigh. I’ll pick up my guitar to play
songs I’ve written for other people, because 

of other people instead of Coheed riffs—
piano jazz instead of tapping the fretboard.

The sun has been setting sooner lately—
memories will compound as days lose heat—

I’ll make a plum cake and listen to Heart. 

Jack Was Every Inch a Sailor / Jessie Lynn McMains

I met him one day when the tall ships docked
in the harbor. He sat by the water and played a beat
on his bucket, a soft one, sometimes, matching

the rhythm of the water. Other times louder, more
insistent. The beat of pirates at battle, of workers
on ship’s decks. I sat down by him and we sang

shanties, drink up, me hearties, yo ho, what shall
we do with a drunken sailor, then took a break
to watch the ships, the wooden hulls black against

the water, the masts and rigging trembling in
the near-tropical breeze. He was out there every
day, he said, as long as the ships stayed around.

Out there in the sun, bucket-drumming, until the
cops chased him away for unspecified crimes,
and he’d longboard home, return early in the

morning. I went back as often as I could, to sing
with him, get stoned, watch the boats. His name
was Jack. Shorn-headed white boy into soul,

ska, and reggae; always in a flat cap and black
pants torn off just below the knee, fraying. He had
bright blue eyes which I can’t describe except

to say the bright didn’t lie in their color, but
something behind them. A St. Elmo’s Fire raging
inside him. He dreamed of one day sailing on

one of those tall ships. Autumn came, then
winter, and we met at the pub, and I followed
him like a lost seadog and he the lighthouse.

Taking walks down to the water, smoking
weed, hiding from the police. Rum-drunk in
the pub, playing Clash songs on the jukebox,

picking fights with Nazi skins. My boyfriend
jealous, thinking I was in love. And I was,
but not like that. I wanted Jack to teach me

how to live in his fearless boy-body, give me
the blue fire from his eyes. For a while, we
had a rocksteady band, the two of us and two

other boys. Jack and I were the rhythm section,
he on drums and me on bass, and for a minute,
we were great. Then I moved away and we lost

touch and I didn’t see him again for a long while.
I dreamed a dream the other night, about the last
time I ever saw him. It was outside a ska show

in Chicago, Jack was nodding out on the sidewalk.
I tried to ask him what he’d been doing all those
years; he could barely speak. But he looked at me,

and I saw that all the light was gone from his
insides, his eyes gone lake-stone flat. He should
have been a drummer, boy, he should have lived

a pirate’s life. He should’ve sailed on a tall tall ship,
climbed the rigging, quick and nimble. Somehow
he sailed elsewhere, got swept into the sea

and swallowed by a whale. Little boy sucked into
the deeps, somewhere his blue fire snuffed out.
Somewhere neither I, nor anyone, could reach.

Evening / Manthipe Moila

Evening slips 
through
the sliver of day

seeps heavy into 
skin like 
thick oil, sits 

soundless – a 
church bell 
on bone

It casts for rib
and settles
somewhere

beneath the belly 
and we 
barely feel 

the keel, the slip
integer by 
integer It pools

in our hair pulls
us somewhere 
subterranean 

The village of us, 
as though 
in a slow tumble, 

tumble and land 
where the night 
wants us to 

Each of us / Kalliopy Paleos

is a proud purse
carrying coins
we collect
and ingest, crying
mine, mine, mine
until we come through
the bewildering seasons
bones emptying
prim attics refusing
to keep our secrets
any longer
and we spend our afternoons

at our thinning skin, knowing
the film between
our body and the world
is flaking off, that
the nurse is not coming
no matter how many times
we press the greasy button.

Oh, we are bags of melting ice
lying on the floor, whimpering
like a little dog being beaten
and only when
we turn onto our side
to turn it all in
like a cloak
to the pretty girl
at the counter
and rise, rise like a flopping puppy
well weaned
wet and sweet
tumbling
in a forest of frosts
in a dawn of cornflowers
looking back to see
between here in heaven
and there in flesh
there is only a
pulsing membrane
as between the crescent chambers
of a tangerine
and oh, how good it is
to be nibbled by the bees

Sutures / Briton Szydloski

tiny little pins

walking on crisp air tonight

i do not feel free

bandaid coverage

weighted blanket/open wounds

rotted carcus below

ripping wide open

bleeding from inside again

blood stain signatures

bloody tattoos dot

markings forever stained on me

crimson guilt raptures

sutures holding on

healing hopefully soon/now

i’m needing reprieve

A Recipe For Living: Purple / Elizabeth Walton

Stilled snap
straight left
standing sharp this

armada this
bubbly caterpillar of spilt
spritz shiraz clipped

whole from
crinkled leaf alive
snapped dripping dazzling

drenched and
squashed and skinned
deseeded juice

wet
fingers
puckered

frozen purple
plastic cube indicted
spared from dying

grace in
mouth this myth
this messed up juice

mellifluent
this hedonistic fetish
going grazing

longing for this
moment

vine strings birdless
dry and lush snapped
laughing

loosing
time

tomorrow I

will melt
eight thousand years of
Black Sea hands

snip swap graft
eat them juice them
slicked chin bound

the blood of mythic Selene,
of Ampelos spent cool slapped spring
hot summer autumn leaving

naked grape
on chopping boards
stand high and lush

decanted Dionysian

Day 3 / Poem 3

Stopped Beside the Bog on Holy Saturday / Sarah Chestnut 

Chorus frog, we are coming home from Easter vigil Mass.
     We are lifting to the late hour our impressions, like smooth
           stones we wish to carry. Crackling pit fire on the church
                portico. Low murmur of the gathered. Spring springing
                      from the altar: hyacinth, lily, daffodil, decked and declarative,
                      tulip, up from the grave. Plunge into darkness. The long, low

waiting for light. Pseudacris crucifer, you know how to slow
     to a stillness, how to trust the antifreeze your liver gives.
           And the waiting. Out from the pregnant dark, the Christ
                candle, flickering procession, spreads flame to flame. It is all
                      familiar, and all brand new. The cantor soars, mercifully long,
                      as we hold our breath to help the altar boy struggling to light

the highest pillar of white wax. Spring peeper, cross-bearer,
     your song instructs us to love being loved. We sit. Stand. Sit.
           Kneel. What are we seeking this night if not the real?
                The moon falls to the earth; earth falls to the sun; sun falls
                      into the hands of the Holy One. You love gravity, too, startled
                      and startling frog, singing your resurrection song. This is the world

holding together. This is baptism by bog and by fire. All you saints,
     pray for us. All wing and wind, pray for us. Choir of peepers roused
           by love for love, pray for us. Little singers, the priest was so happy
                this night, dunking a bundle of holy twigs into an urn of holy water
                      and flinging, flinging the world of wet on all our laughing faces.
                      He had held want in his belly like a hibernating frog for months.

EXPLODING SONNET 4.2.24 / Marnie Bullock Dresser

Our forsythia’s really going to town this year
Instead of our usual seven to ten pitiful
blossoms total, both bushes are lit up, full
of 4-petaled yellow spotlights, each a gold star
of spring and hope and life and just—contentedness.
So of course we’re getting snow. Possibly 8 inches.
I said life before. But snow is also life
of course. As is disappointment. Really it’s fine.

I almost said yellow stars before.
But didn’t. The math wasn’t right.
I looked it up to be sure.
My pictures blurred the number.
But it certainly wasn’t a six-sided star
I had in mind. This is not political.
I’m not political. I certainly can’t
fix anti-semitism and state-sponsored
terrorism in one sonnet.
Surely I wouldn’t complain about snow
after reading the news that workers
from a group I intend to donate to
delivered 100 tons of food and then
were blown up. Just—demolished.

List of things that are white and yellow: fried eggs,
beach towels, snapchat logo, Twinkies, snakes:
several pythons, boas, corn and rat snakes.
Daisies, baby clothes, budgies, some chicken legs.
Our poor forsythia, finally old enough to bloom
a lemon ton, only to be smeared by blinding white.

Ask Me How / Marshall Malin

I visited a country for several years
and missed the country, wished for it 
to be my own. I moved to that country. 

The Spanish isn’t the Spanish I’d 
been taught in school. You need to know 
what birra and pija are and which you want. 

As autumn comes and the mornings 
are cold, I miss Riverside Park. But the crunch 
of the leaves is the same here—

orange anger browning on cracked
sidewalks—boludo, he says, te amo tanto—

what isn’t the same rocks then wrecks 
when I remember where I’ve been—

obviously I miss pumpkin spiced lattes, 
Thai food, Three Lives, the 1 train, 
but I have the quiet calle Lima, the paths 

I walk now, the plums and kiwis, Plaza
Alberdi. I have my own haunts here. 
The Garay family took advantage of my 

kindness—promised me siblings and parents.
Emanuel almost broke my ankle in only a 
glimpse of his anger—decaded friends. 

Twelve years later, I’m still here, remember 
when I could take the bondi for one peso, 
when Cristina was still president. 

The circles of my neighborhood, my loves
are small but glowing golden, growing, 
full of bellylaughs and buena onda. 

August Pastoral Addressed to the Feejee Mermaid / Jessie Lynn McMains

That night, we wandered into a tent promising
strange delights, and what else would a fifteen
year old girl want? There was a punk rock chicken,
which was just a rooster whose comb stood up

sorta like a mohawk haircut. There were dead
things floating in jars. A two-headed fawn, a mouse,
a baby shark. After, before the Tilt-a-Whirl and
the funnel cakes, we wandered the backlots. Maryland

field of dirt and dung; cicadas screaming in the black
cherry trees, fair-goers screaming on the rides. I
thought of you then, tiny monkeyfish, your gorgeous
freakery. The way they gawped at you. I felt wrong,

too. For what I wanted. Her hand was almost in mine.

Dear future self,  / Manthipe Moila

If you are still wondering 
why you are here – you came
to close the tabs of yourself 
that open to fire, to alarms
blaring messages of caution,
error, error, error. ..

There are many more
than you had anticipated.
Continue pressing away
at the points of pain. 

Have hope, dear, that
there will come a time when 
language bends toward 
forgiveness
like a body toward 
an oasis. 

What do I know? 
Maybe you are already 
in that time, 
holding the door open 
for me. 

Friendship / Kalliopy Paleos

Sucking on lemon ices
roaming Melbourne Avenue 
together in our comfortable way
I noticed a sweet melting stream carve along my wrist
saw suddenly there was only once ice,
and I was alone in the warm evening
The pavement tilted
splitting between my feet
a breaking open of a seed
and gathering fog
pressing in as though I were the hollowness
inside a lost purse
Nor did you reveal anything further
giving leave to the street to reflect its rain
and me
forgotten as any still November night.

Touching Myself / Briton Szydloski

Sometimes I feel so lonely;

I just touch myself to remember

The feeling

Of being touched

If I could get it tattooed on my breasts

Where others should touch to please me

I would

Because I have touched myself enough

To tell others

How to do their job right.

i have touched myself enough

to justify

not letting others explore me

because i already know the way

to g marks the spot

i don’t need someone else to tell me how

or rather

do it for me.

/ / / / /

I’ve found such a profound sense

Of intimacy in myself

There’s a stark difference

Between

The lives i live inside of me.

They pleasure each other

In the way’s they can’t pleasure themselves

In the same way

That I pleasure myself

When you’re not there

To do it for me.

Day 2 / Poem 2

Encourage / Sarah Chestnut

                  —After “The Gift” by Mary Oliver

 Take heart, my soul, and rise.
The hour is neither too early
nor too late and the hush without
is the gift extended.  The hand
trembles in its reach.

I am saying, take the cry of your mind
into your arms like a child wrenched from sleep
by harsh dreams, and soothe.
And quiet.  Love what comes.
Love bravely what is yet coming.
Such seriousness is a shadow.  It takes
courage to play.

THE WEIGHT / Marnie Bullock Dresser

One of my favorite laughs is one I stole
from Meg Tilly in The Big Chill when she goes
“HA! ha ha ha” in response to William Hurt
saying the dead guy would ask “What’s for dessert?”
Oh, that movie—we didn’t hate Boomers yet,
my friends and I; I’m not sure we called them that.
We saw it so many times, in 1983,
which meant a long walk to the theater because we,
college freshmen, couldn’t have cars on campus.
Banter, sex, dancing, college—it was about us.
Our melancholy wasn’t because of age.
We identified with each character like a badge.
One friend said since I was our group’s glue that I
reminded her most of all of the suicide.

Hold / Marshall Malin

Birds, before the slammed car door,
silent, or not, on their branches, braced;

before the storm begins, the clouds’ water;
before darkness, the dusk—flight, rain, night!

It tastes like the breakfast I made 
this morning: bacon, eggs, toast, fruit—

feels like fresh skin against clean sheets—
looks like anything completely normal but 

isn’t—two guys in a grocery store
repeating their affections in each aisle, 

normal enough, but I’m one of them, 
I’m the one wearing the pink hat. 

I held my breath and breathed out patience.
I held my breath because I could see myself

in the pink hat, next to him, buying coffee
and deodorant. And he was so beautiful, 

and it was so complicated, but now no—

now
is

different, dreamt up, but persists—how 
odd to see myself in his pictures of me

after having seen myself first 

waiting—

Rabbit Heart / Jessie Lynn McMains

I am the seagull’s wing wheeling
through the gray sky. I am the waves
roaring a half mile away. I am
the silver-bellied fish, rocking in the dark
belly of the lake, and I am the silver
dreams of the fish. I am the rabid
void, shambling sideways
through the neighbor’s yard. My rabbit
heart racing, spooked by nothing,
nada, arrowing its way across
the quiet street. I am the rabbit, and
I am the rain. And I am the warped
gray guitar left out in the rain
too long.

After the funeral / Manthipe Moila

after the funeral and that unfamiliar stiffness we could not recognise as kin, we return to our lives with a soft kind of relief. the world spills onto a chair and then slips off. we do with the emptiness what we always have done. fill it with the green ink of the han river, hoping that its undulations carry us through. or gauze the surroundings and say: actually, there is something in there, something like a man in a balaclava on a bike lifting his hands to cup his lips and shout obscenities. there’s an angel, there is flying, there is the possibility that we will know each other again. 

Humans in the Water Cycle / Kalliopy Paleos

Morgue / Briton Szydloski

i have a morgue

inside my brain

i keep all

my dead friends

up there

compartmentalized

in casket shaped

cartons

boxes of memories

i wish not to look at

i feel them die

when they don’t

answer my calls anymore

when they answer

in one word sentences

when i feel

my push

but not their pull

…

i used to play

tug of war

with my dog

he was geriatric

so i didn’t

know him long

i would love

to play again

but it wouldn’t

be the same

i miss you sal

Never Look Desperate / Elizabeth Walton

Day 1 / Poem 1

Marital Poetries / Sarah Chestnut 

You must trundle your soul before mysteries.
Look long, then look longer, at intricacies.
Withhold disdain for discrepancies;
ask instead, is this a case of subtleties?
You must coax your heart with proximities—
leg, lash, listen: lean into uncertainties.
For each miss, say, countless mutualities.
Poke fun at your self-sinking gravities.
You must outgrow your certainties;
resist reduction to tendencies;
be ruthless with all your idolatries.
Expect and make toast to treat maladies.
You may bemoan different frequencies,
but hold fast to the joy of harmonies.

-For J.W.C.

OUT OF MISERY / Marnie Bullock Dresser

My Dad went for a walk with a dog and a gun and a shovel
at least twice in my childhood, coming home
with only two of the three. The alternative
was a man called Happy, on Lynchburg Road,
with a wildlife mural on the side of his shop.
We didn’t pay veterinarians to kill our animals
until the 80s. My sweet Wooly was the first.

When Dad and I took long walks, Wooly insisted
on coming along, but when he got tired, he’d flop
at our feet and whine until we carried him.

We lived so far out in the country.
People dropped animals all the time.
I told my uncle I thought there was a special place
in Hell for people who did that. He did that.

I never thought less of my Dad for doing what he did.
I thought he did what he had to do. I thought he was kind.

(Yes of course we tried to find homes for them, but
everyone we knew already had all the dogs and cats
they wanted, more than they wanted, like us.)

The hard thing my father is currently doing is dying
after years of dementia. It’s awful. It’s ugly.
Today he kept a pill in his mouth instead
of swallowing it. Eventually his mouth filled up
with white foam that spilled down his shirt.
It looked like toothpaste. Or poison. Or rabies.
He’d have never let a dog keep suffering that way.

For Cappuccino & Cuppa Joe, my Dogs / Marshall Malin

April showers bring fall shivers
withered leaves cover the streets—

on rainy days it costs to leave,
spiral of the fall, anxiety of cold

weaponry of trash on sidewalks—
no, don’t smell the trash, 

or the butcher’s chickenwater 
let’s go around the block—

I’ll leave their coats long, 
and by my winter in July

they will sleep and stare at me,
Joe will have grown, Cappu

will have gotten a little older—

Twenty Years Ago I Stepped Into a Painting Named Nighthawks / Jessie McMains

A bad use of time / Manthipe Moila

We say a bad use of time
as though time were a pencil 
you stick into the soil to stake
your monstera adansonii 
or toothpaste in the hair 
for washing. 

We are not quite
sure what to call where we 
are nor how far it reaches. 

We ask of things what use 
they are unless they run 
out or make themselves 
scarce.

We try to run out 
of this place (call it ‘behind’) 
only to find we are running 
in place running 
behind still so 
behind that breath 
has very nearly left us – 

Eye Exam / Kalliopi Paleos

My father is always watching me 
but today as I checked 
before changing lanes
he smiled through 
the rearview mirror
from the yellow tinge
clinging to my retinae

You can drive home, no problem
the doctor had reassured me
(his pinky deftly 
opening each eyelid
slipping in 
a single oily drop)
It’s just so I can check 
the health of your eyes.

Now I plunge north on route 17
and as if from below the surface 
of an amber lake I’d been scrying
hoping for any sign
in my filmy yellow eyes
I see blue wisps of his Marlboro burning
the green Porsche
classy-looking girls 
pearl buttons hanging loose
from their silky blouses

Next fall, we can talk 
about that surgery
the doctor had said
in his muscular voice
You’ll be amazed
by how well you can see

Introspection / Briton Szydloski

i’ve been so introspective lately

it feels like

i’m walking around

in my head

where there’s no sunshine

but only flashlights

that’s not to say

there’s no happiness

it’s just hard to see

i’m having dizzy spells

that are manifesting

in shifty looking corners

lost balance

turns into shitty

figure skating

i feel as if im in a labyrinth

i’m not scared or anything

nothings chasing me

but i’m just lost

inside my mind

what’s to say

this garden maze

isn’t

marked with roses

for walls

it’s just hard to pay attention

to the small things

when you don’t

even know where you are

in the first place

or what you’re looking for.

A Recipe for Living / Elizabeth Walton

If you find
yourself in the

Age of Pesto
three

quarters through
summer

the green tiles
holding

the smart
recipes

falling
through hands

unwashed unrhymed the second
mouse rind the kind reaching out

for a metaphor
a recipe

for love
lost bleeding

belated
in buckets

of basil
in kitchen

the counter in want
of a hand

to slake towards
the edge of

season the taste the hedonist reason the haste

move it around olive oil

raw garlic
cold pressed no cheese

now blend

it down go slow go
scrape the

lip or lick the ice
cube trays reserve

for spaghetti
in winter