THE DECEMBER, 2024 30/30 PROJECT PAGE

The volunteer poets for December are:  Marcia Black, Suzzette Dawes, Janel Galnares, Ellen Ferguson, Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈), and Mattie Quesenberry Smith

If you would like to join our alumni group of over 1,000 poets, apply here!

Day 31 / Poem 31

To Engender Fire / A cento composed by Janel Galnares

with 13 lines each by Marcia Black, Suzzette Dawes, Janel Galnares, Ellen Ferguson, Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈), and Mattie Quesenberry Smith

The first snow fell today, the heaviest in a century.
I like to paint my skies blue even when gray
the sky’s mouth has been a cathedral of echoes sounding it out.
Lift now the lid of the jar of heaven
and I entered the mouth of God, into a bona fide oral cavity
where bones are newly cleaned
fractured and fraught by life.
I asked you while kneeling, why do we honor?
Faith is both immortal and sealed:
a box on a shelf filled with ribbon & robin’s egg blue bags. A box on a shelf filled with ribbon. A box on a shelf. A box.
It remembers everything
a photo album, wrapped in soft-touch vinyl, preserving in plastic what failed to preserve in flesh.
Skip that! It’s a screenshot
i needed to receive it as a gift.

Speaking of, for your birthday, there’s confetti and frosting, or…
Join the boat parade!
Give ‘em – hell, our gladiator cry, spandex-slapped ass
iridescent or indecent?
I made a wish to ask Claude McKay for insight.
It only takes one good poet to engender fire.
This mirage: the world engulfed.
Where you take the particulars
six golden Anjous, blushing through their foil
burning stars is redundant I thought
b is a letter that stopped my speech
maybe the stars carved us.
I write with the love of the old scribes,
the scribbles in the phone booth were obscene.
We are the living pulse of language.

In case you’ve forgotten your failures
a man found a strange situation
getting looks teaching hubris
as piano keys wailed under his fingers.
To be a machine must be a drag—
their cadence and tone, how they lead a meeting,
always calculating, but never dreaming—
fortunately, the $19.50 and $22.50 New Queen Sewing Machines.
Catfish have got to feel real
a silvered fish hanging
he was a shimmer i loved.
To be human is to be the sleepwalker who wakes up other sleepers
crushed and running, old
a silent promise – i wouldn’t cry where she cried
the feeling that drinking together until three in the morning is less about the drinking and more about the morning.

This morning, I am set to recover what you left behind:
the human mom, grown two years older, feels the dog’s shadow beside her.
Every morning now when i awaken i cup my hands on my bones
sanding to smooth, then mudding.
Turquoise seas call me to travel.
The door to Camp Bacon sits open, like “Choose your Loaves,” page 22:
deciding where to go has always been a hassle.
I don’t know how to be free
or is it my fear? Fear in painting myself!
My story has been forgetful, an encroaching erasure
and occupation makes a map, a mother, a missing person.
I want you to know her story, too.

Through the window, I sometime stare
every window crusted in sun
when Gertrude bulbed cold across the orchard.
Now i stand under the tall sycamore in my backyard—
consider that baby memorized.
Whose life this eternal road trip?
Life burns from the center
gravity is earth’s beloved
fortune doesn’t favor the thrown
the bee in the orchard quotes without fenders
the sunlight evacuates the ridges layer by layer
until what is dark descends to resemble blindness
a weight as suffocating as the years we lost lying about our names.
Olive groves beheaded in gaza
the Tree of Life Herself
our country is going extinct
the absence of ghosts frightens me.
Every year i protect my sycamore from moral admonitions.
I wake up each day to a den of thieves.
The roof could not collapse soon enough.
I’ve tied the ends of earth together;
the last thing I will say is that I love you.

Day 30 / Poem 30

the thinnest tissue / Marcia Black

Resolution  / Suzzette Dawes

poetry stands up to fascism part i / Janel Galnares

Like a carnation held to the bridge of a cocked gun
words have never been enough and are necessary.
I was regrettably never a Black Panther.
I am a trained fighter but not a soldier
and my words fall flat more than they sing.
But I get up every morning, early or late,
employed or unemployed, humming.

Afterthought on the Sale of Bob Dylan’s Catalogue  / Ellen Ferguson

God’s latte / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

I knew I was supposed to believe 
in something called transubstantiation.
the monastic bread (or styrofoam wafer),
now a pierced side made whole, from nailed 
feet to bowed neck, exalted by hands
joined in eucharistic communion.

as a undergraduate I spent months asking
how my uncertain hands ought to proceed 
– clasped, folded, or hidden – if belief failed
to affirm flour as more Christ-like than rice, 
if hours of Benedictine theology class 
could not resolve why I must believe 
the bread to change if I am to partake 
in a ritual I did not understand.

sacred mysteries, a monk once told me, 
need not understanding to be understood.
the Saturday morning latte tasted light, the chair’s
cushion soft and grounded. I left believing 
myself to be neither a betraying Peter nor 
a doubting Thomas, and for the first 
time in six months, proceeded to the altar,
hands open, to receive the nourishment 
I now felt liberated to eat.

years later, dismayed by a community 
that refused (unlike its savior) to move 
across substance, I heard the song
that had once moved me to tears. 
how light and grounding it once felt,
softening the nails that pierced my side. 
now, each time I bake bread outside of faith,
I knead with more certain, unfolded hands.

Day 29 / Poem 29

Cento / Marcia Black 

Love  / Suzzette Dawes

On Divine Sense / Janel Galnares

After reading from Evelyn Underhill’s Worship (1929), found in a Little Free Library in Uptown, Chicago, IL, originally published in the year of my grandmother’s birth.

Some feel an unmistakable call to God.

I feel something mistakable.

When we speak of destiny my ears perk up, sure, a plan

but whose? I do not feel Him or Her, do not hear Their directives.

Sometimes I also hope for closeness of divine wisdom,

for a justice higher than our lowly courts,

for a perfection of goodness and ideals we cannot touch.

When I look for signs I see poetry

I see rainbows ahead of my car’s path lodged in fading sunsets

I see summer seed bugs grasping for light under my front door 

and spider mites living atop sunflowers on my back porch.

I see doves ousted by hawks on the overhangs of old churches 

and animal companions who don’t outlive us, drawing near. 

I see the lost, myself among them, within fairytale forests of ancient times

I see those who suffer, we all share in it, its demanding occupation.

I see those who have lost all hope

and those who have just begun to believe in love.

I search for truth from within my own psyche

as if the divine is within me though I know not

but of the mystery of poetry;

its inspired sense, its ordered revelations,

its comfort to that sixth sense we call the soul,

life’s spark, ever unknowing, ever seeking.

I question.

I speak. I call out!

I surrender to the unknown universe’s untenable pull.

The law of attraction of divine sense relents.

Gilgamesh: An Epic Catalogue Epilogue / Ellen Ferguson

• Gilgamesh

on my way / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

I ushered you into the afterlife
the same way I had welcomed you 
to the present one: too late. 
a drop-by shadow. 

It would have been me,
on time, in the light, had your
adopters, told me earlier 
that I’d need to say goodbye 
to you over the phone amid 
a crowd of commuting suits. 

You must have been lying there
on the cold table, hopefully atop your
warm blanket but maybe not. I still
do not know many of the details,
because I was only told: you were in pain.
I asked, could it wait just a few days.
Our mother said no, denying as much your right
as mine to give input. Like most meetings
conducted in a suit, so this one ended:
with an authority figure claiming more
authority than any founder intended.

I would have outdriven the police
to hold your paw, or your ankle, or just
your chin as you fell asleep to the same
tune I would hum to you atop queen-sized
blankets. Instead, I simply said: 

Goodbye, Lucy –
I will miss you, Lucy –
You were a good dog, Lucy –

I would have outrun all the suits 
around all the corners, had I thought
my steps could take me to you.

I let you out how many times
to chase how many squirrels 
only to say the most ridiculous words
through speakers you didn’t understand
inside a room where for all I knew

you were already gone

Leaving the Holidays / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Day 28 / Poem 28

renunciated flowers / Marcia Black 

Another Low-Cost Airline  / Suzzette Dawes

AI Says / Janel Galnares

AI-Says

The Odyssey epic epilogue  / Ellen Ferguson

• Homer

wannabe / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

as a child I knew soy sauce was for pouring 
over rice, like ketchup. we all did it this way,
the Korean adoptee campers who sang
children’s songs in romanized shame.
only as an adult, and only as a married one, 
did I learn: the saltier, sharper kind is for simmering 
into stews; the sweeter, mellower kind for dipping 
into, but never poured over, especially not
over rice (the Whitest thing to do).
only today, as a married adult healed a little
more than last year, did I learn: when Hyein
asks why I use 국간장 more often — the saltier,
sharper kind — this feels like salt in micro-wounds, 
the slits accumulated on my wrists poured 
over shame, the tears grieving all
the Whiteness I still retain despite
trying for a decade to pour it empty.

Things I Cannot Purge from this Cluttered House / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

I cannot get rid of the potted grapefruit tree
My son grew from a seed sprouting from
The center of his halved grapefruit,
Twenty-eight years ago. Twenty-eight years
Pass with few memories, but the grapefruit tree
Stands there in the living room, remembering
His excitement for what lives at the center
Of its sweet, ruby-red sections.
I cannot get rid of any of the artwork
My children made, no, not the elephant
Painting my son finished in high school.
It inhabits the living room, too. I cannot
Get rid of my daughter’s sun hat, signed by
Bill Monroe the day he sang “Blue Moon of Kentucky”
Thirty-four years in Floyd County, Virginia.
I won’t get rid of the two red and green God’s eyes,
My daughter made from sticks and yarn, hanging
From the corner of the sliding glass door. I won’t
Get rid of the two necklaces my daughter embroidered:
the solar system spins against a black backdrop, and
A cool stream flows over smooth stones, both
Encircled by wooden frames the size of quarters.
I cannot get rid of any of the paintings by one daughter
Or son or another, all windows into our world
Uniquely captured and framed in time. I cannot
Throw away the fishing flies, hand-tied by my son;
his greeting cards made from papercut flowers
that spring from vases; all my daughters’ hand-beaded
necklaces held inside a box made for me by my
father; several classy purses; gifts of storebought
necklaces and earrings; a tiny wood salt dish with a
baby spoon, brown and comfortable like a nest
I have not even started the list of the things I cannot
Get rid of—everything holds love, forgiveness, and grace.
I cannot throw them away and forget them all at once.

Day 27 / Poem 27

devotion / Marcia Black

Decisions  / Suzzette Dawes

[ASSASSI]NATION / Janel Galnares

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” – Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, 41 days before his assassination

With lines from “Social Media’s Assassination of Brian Thompson,” 4sightHEALTH, Market Corner Commentary, December 10, 2024 by David W. Johnson

before dawn / Manhattan / investor meeting
masked / Mount Sinai West Hospital / assassin—
capital / bullet casings / Deny Defend Depose
honorable man / CEO / $22 billion
viral / victim villain / social media
celebrating death / laughing emoji / anger
fear / prescription costs / medical debt
underinsured / burdensome / struggle
wake / rhetoric / U.S. healthcare industry
reckoning / aftermath / security 
animosity / revolutionary / trigger 
accelerate / transformation / admonition

The Catalogue of Women: An epic catalogue epigraph  / Ellen Ferguson

• Hesiod

Nobody but you / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

Your Zelle payment is complete.
             The Verizon family plan I share with my father, the one I’ve been meaning to end, if only
             so the estrangement will feel that much cleaner.
You’re getting rid of some paper!
             The State Farm refund came in the mail last week, after 75 minutes on the phone.
Your daily job alert
             The ones I no longer read from LinkedIn, Working Nomads, Welcome to the Jungle. 
Your $100 eCredit
             The Delta Reserve card we hold onto, its metal weight felt in the hand.

Your December 2024 statement
             The AmEx confirmation that I
have rebuilt my life. Namely, from 530 to 849.
Your bill statement is ready –
             (The hyphen should really be a dash, or at least a period. Best, nothing at all.)
Your latest statement is ready to view.
             Once, I argued with my bank about the fourth time I had overdrafted. I worked in 
             corporate then. Paid to write words spoken by other people. Their voice, worth millions 
             more than mine.
Your beta reader matchup group
             I used to be so intimidated by phrases like “beta reader.” The fear that I’d missed my 
             moment, that I’d sold out. That I should have just focused more. That whatever potential I had              ended with the letters: ADHD.
Your inspection report
             We bought a rental property last winter. It paid for Bread Loaf, for Tin House, for my 
             developmental edit. I don’t know if it is wise to share my former profession. No prize, 
             no workshop feedback, no announcement of where I’ve been published can 
             dissuade the voice of Herb Brooks: you are not talented enough to win on talent alone.
            
It’s time to check in for your flight!
             I’m already here
Gold status is yours
             You can keep it.
Tips for your home search
             At first, I thought it was Korea. All along, it was actually entangled between 
             what I could measure and what I could grieve.

Nearby, Wild Columbines Nod / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Nearby, the wild columbines nod inside curling winds,
Stamens hanging like laughter-tongues telling the sunlight
To highlight the evidence.

Nearby, the wild columbines nod inside curling winds,
Their light, golden tongues suspend
Glad bees in their spring delight.

Nearby, the wild columbines nod inside curling winds,
Stamens hanging like laughter-tongues telling the sunlight.

Day 26 / Poem 26

Wrong Number  / Suzzette Dawes

Beowulf: An Epic Catalogue Epigraph  / Ellen Ferguson

• Beowulf

Shoebox / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

how the cedar paneling flaked off, musty as the souvenirs I kept in a shoebox — 
         a map from Voyageurs National Park, an agate plucked from Lake Superior.

how my father said, “the thing is, I trust him” as I walked in on an argument not meant for me. 
        how he would tell me, whenever Pink Floyd’s “Mother” played over tinny Jeep speakers:
        “this song is about your mother. just remember: par-a-no-ya is a deep de-stro-ya.”

how the hockey ricocheted off the basement cement wall as my brother descended the stairs, striking the helmet he happened to be carrying over his stomach. 
        how I later told him on a snow-covered hill, just before I gave his sled a starting nudge: 
        “when you grow up, you can be anything.”

how my mother and I returned to our plywood home one afternoon, after swimming lessons, to a police car in the driveway, two teenagers inside. 
        how the taller one looked defiant, the shorter one with slumped shoulders staring down at the floor. 
                 how white paint was splashed all over. 
                 how my father had chased them down and dragged them by their tee-shirt neck back to the scene of the crime. 
“this is why it’s important to choose your friends carefully,” my mother concluded.

how we left that home as quickly as we had stayed for two decades: 
        slowly. all at once. like it never began. like it never stopped.
        like we had buried it in the backyard. like we once left, but returned. 
        like we never returned because we had never left.
        like there were no boxes to move, so there were also none to open.

In the Heat of the Winter / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

It’s Christmas Day and in the heat of the winter,
One man resists the warm play of the firelight
Across his face. He resists the chiming bells
And the telltale signs of joy ringing throughout
The night. It only takes this man or that one
To hem in our story. His heart beats in asynchronous
Time, making room for clamors and cold people,
Making room for eternal wakes where we stare at the
Milk-white faces of the dead, numbered with the stars.

Day 25 / Poem 25

Yet Again  / Suzzette Dawes

A Holiday Collection / Janel Galnares

Silent-Night

The Bible: An Epic Catalogue Epigraph  / Ellen Ferguson

• The Bible, Matthew 14:18-21

Genie / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

Salt Lake City Slackliner / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

The
Barefoot
Slackliner
Crouches
And sways.
In the heart of the day, tethered by the waist, he walks the line like water over the valley.
In the heart of the day, my startled newborn throws his arms and legs out and cries, still tethered to
The
Blood-born,
Umbilicus.
Hands,
splayed.

Day 24 / Poem 24

My desert rose  / Suzzette Dawes

Dark Shadows / Janel Galnares

The last of the year
the last of the departed sun
light spills over hills
in long exhale.
Tired hands brush the sky
the day thins
weighty darkness falls
trees still—
no sound but their whisper,
a small scratching of leaves on wind.
Time pauses.
The beginning and end
only moments apart:
between the warm sun’s wink
and dark shadows that await the world.

Moby Dick: An Epic Catalogue Epigraph   / Ellen Ferguson

• Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes

Adoptee abecedarian (Korean consonants only) / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

ㄱ
Costa Rica Spanish immersion plans canceled to study Korean, the alphabet I could not decrypt 

ㄴ
no self-permission granted until the only other Korean adoptee I knew on campus acknowledged the notion that I already had made a 

ㄷ
decision and I now just had to come to understand it, not dissimilar form how Keanu

ㄹ
Reeves leaves his life as Mr. Anderson to follow Morpheus into The Real to see for himself the

ㅁ
Matrix, which for me for me was less about turning human beings into a 

ㅂ
battery and more about realigning the force fields into magnetic lines, neat as my somatic 
brain-spotting

ㅅ
means fuck also “poetry” plus “foot,” so that the first rule I wrote on the chalkboard when I taught English in Korea was: “No poetry foot allowed”

ㅈ
Juggling the ways I judged other adoptees who didn’t know how to instruct a taxi driver to avoid traffic jams, justify an argument or adjust a haircut

ㅊ
choices I made that left memories, some cherished and others charred, of the country that abandoned me

ㅋ
written in three “hahaha” except sounding like keuh keuh keuh 

ㅌ
TOPIK, the Korean proficiency test that confirmed I would never become fluent

ㅍ
Payment of one hundred and twenty dollars each time I parked within six feet of a driveway on my way to class

ㅎ
Hallways holding hoards of students seeking to hone their English and hop abroad, while I was

ㄲ
ㄸ
ㅃ
ㅆ
ㅉ
Double versions of five consonants
Two universes bridged via wormhole
Duality brought upon all who migrate against their will
A pair of cities so close in proximity they’re called twins
The siblings my birthmother forbids me to meet, even after she is gone

Creel of Keepers / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Day 23 / Poem 23

Surprise  / Suzzette Dawes

Decluttering a Home / Janel Galnares

Everyone who knows me said it was no surprise when I was diagnosed with OCD.
Us poets and our obsessions with language, with order and sound, punctuation, 
everything in the right place. Although I like to organize thoughts into words, 
in my home, my things are for the most part a mess. It didn’t seem to make sense. 
Not when my mother, undiagnosed, was so neat, our home sweeped 
and sterile as though hardly lived in. Now my things, these physical things
all have meaning and symbolize something to me; I collect them as memories. 
Maybe I can write them out of my home with its overwhelm of clutter.
I’ve started over before. I’ve divorced. I gave up so much of that home.
But now in a life that’s more my own, the things on the top shelf of my desk each represent
a memory cherished, or at least something nice that brings momentary comfort.
The wooden flower figurine I once gifted to my grandfather. It came back to me
when we went through his home and his things that once all meant something to him.
Fake pink rose bouquet, I never thought I would have fake roses at my wedding, my second.
But they last and last, no dead flowers framed. My husband said when we move 
in a few months if there is a space in a yard for a small garden 
he’ll plant me roses, like in my original home, and herbs, like in my second home, 
both from childhood. My mother loved to cook and my husband loves to cook 
and some people and their habits bring you comfort, too, even their things that become yours
like a warm, heavy blanket with its pattern of snow, polar bears, and penguins 
which was once my husband’s blanket which has now become the dog’s on the dog’s couch.
I have for so long taken the clutter of my mind to page to let it breathe
like a sand mandala ritual for thoughts, or as an alchemist who transmutes life’s blood into ink. 
So perhaps if I can make art out of the objects of my home
and transform these artifacts, ceremonial, into poems perhaps I can feel 
like they have fulfilled their use—or at least can settle into a place.

The Prelude: An Epic Catalogue Epigraph   / Ellen Ferguson

•                      William Wordsworth, “The Prelude, Book One:

좋은 날 (Good day) / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

your snow-sloped neckline, the coffee-hued sweaters, knowing brothers flickering on TV like candles – these were the wood chips you sprinkled for my ankles, weak as the coffee you pour each morning in silence, beckoning through soft blinks as if to remind: it’s here for the taking, this quiet life, the folding chairs all put away, the firewood stacked, the cudgel long since abandoned for ceramic mugs warmed by swirling the leftover kettle water, clockwise or maybe counter-clockwise, either direction we have found the good day, the rinsed spoon, the walk along sidewalks I shoveled for you, in stride with Penny whom you woke early to feed for me, our mutual promise that the following day will be no more simple nor less beautiful than icicle licks, than coffee grinding, than a new sweater, than the same neckline greeting the same candlelit table.

Day 22 / Poem 22

On a Shelf  / Suzzette Dawes

Blessings / Janel Galnares

Blessed be the dog who lays at your feet, head cocked, ears listening for danger.
Bless the dog that tries to share her bones with you.
Blessed be the friend whose ears embrace your high-pitched voice
who catches your frantic words and promptly returns your chaos with a wink.
Bless the friend who turns tears into unstoppable, suffocating laughter that roars and roars.
Blessed be the family who claims the lost and abandoned as their own.
Bless the family that wraps you in the warmth of their joy over who you’ve become.
Blessed be the partners who remain strong in solitude but unravel in each other’s arms.
Bless the husband who in a pinch gives hugs and chocolate freely.
Blessed be the brother who apologizes first, lets wash away years of resentment.
Bless the older brother who despite pride and ego, serves olive oil with shared bread.

 Paradise Lost:  An Epic Catalogue Epilogue  / Ellen Ferguson

불장난 (playing with fire) / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

once a lamp would not die out 

Driving into Luray at Sunset Today / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Day 21 / Poem 21

dreams i have heard/ no one knows / Marcia Black

Limericks for Dumb Criminals  / Suzzette Dawes

Too Little, Too Late / Janel Galnares

A coat draped over a body that has turned to stone.
Pesticide sprayed on sunflowers already drained by spider mites.
A letter found at the bottom of the mailbox by a stranger who never knew its sender.
A raincloud squeezing its last drops over a parched desert.
An apology whispered on a deathbed.
A broken clock fixed behind the doors of a closed elementary school.
A picture of the sunset snapped just as the last light fades into darkness.
A sweater knitted for a child who has outgrown it before it can be sent.
New paint sprayed over crumbling foundation.
A seed buried in infertile soil.
A pile of unfinished reports, the promise of more money but not enough time.
A stack of work left untouched.
Emailed suggestions lost in the void.
A calendar of deadlines that no longer matter
like a list of ghosts that can no longer haunt you.

  Leaves of Grass: An Epic Catalogue Epigraph    / Ellen Ferguson

• Walt Whitman

Solo / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

SOLO

One Poet / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Day 20 / Poem 20

sticks stones and names / Marcia Black

Dear Claude McKay  / Suzzette Dawes

Untitled / Janel Galnares

There are tragedies that we mourn
and tragedies we don’t know how to mourn—
the quiet collapse of worlds we cannot see.

There are other tragedies that go on without much notice,
tragedies we don’t even know of
far from our buzz of headphones, distractions and diversions.

Evil is the absence of everything that makes sense,
its motives unrelatable, the world half-blind.
Its roots cut deep under the soil of forgotten graves.

We try to justify being warm
when thousands are freezing to death,
being fed when millions go hungry.

We feel the need to make excuses
for enjoying our lives
when so many are dead from war and disease.

Indifference does not soften the edges
of the world’s wounds
or the hypocrisies of existence.

You cannot fight a war and not be a killer;
anger is the only half-decent feeling left
among our dearest nations of blood-feeders.

New Jersey/Paterson: An Epic Catalogue Epigraph    / Ellen Ferguson

• William Carlos Williams, Paterson

• Who recently said, at an event at the New York Public Library, that “a writing routine” was a gendered concept, and that the aforementioned locale offered her “writing routine” for her blockbuster novels.
  

1 minute 1 second / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

Nik-1-Minute-1-Second

Daydreams and Hauntings / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Daydreams and haunting remain from the poets
You have known before, joys and lamentations.
But lamentations remain after twilight, so it is
Lamentations you recover first. Sadness catches
In the whorl of a child’s listening like an earwig
Grown out of irresponsibility or discernment.
Which is it this morning? The rain catches
On the ridges and falls within the gentle mist.

In the dead of winter, the trees’ twig tips hold
Sweet teardrops and reflect the whole scene:
The doubting poets stand, shoulder-to-shoulder,
Stoop to look at what’s inside. These droplets
Have always been windows into our world.
In our background, we see House Mountain
And the crooked path there. We see a few
Broken trees along the way, but everyone’s eyes
Focus on the center of surprise there:

The poets, standing together, shoulder-to-shoulder,
Study the hanging raindrops that reshape their worlds.

Day 19 / Poem 19

Pictures on my Phone  / Suzzette Dawes

A La Volonté Du Peuple / Janel Galnares

Original song lyrics by Claude-Michel Schönberg (1980)
A translation from the French

“Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?”

To the will of the people
And to the health of progress
Fill your heart with a rebellious wine
And until tomorrow, faithful friend
We want to make light
Despite the mask of night
To illuminate our land
And change our life.

We must win the war
Our trench to dig
To clear away the misery
For the golden harvest of peace
Who will dance with joy
In the grand wind of liberty.

To the will of the people
I give my will.
If we must die for her
I myself want to be the first
The first name engraved
On the marble monument of hope.

Ulysses Chapter Twelve: The Epic Catalogue Epigraph    / Ellen Ferguson

• James Joyce

• James Joyce

• James Joyce

APT. / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

before we both swiped right 
I had wiped out my net worth
on 양념 치킨 paired with: hi there,
안녕하세요~ what r u up to, do u like
peanut butter or jelly, marshmallows 
burnt or browned for edging – 

when you came over, before
the bed, a blueberry pancake
flipping show, for brunch and
wholesome foreplay masked
as platonic nudging, your task: 
a shared one, two, ten ways 

of asking – would it be okay 
if I / would you please stay 
if I / would you have swiped
right again if I / would you like
the AC turned higher and then
could I / would you come over
again, if I / took you / back could
I / forget what I was / looking
for when we / said yes / did I
put us both over the edge
when I / said it was no problem
you were moving to Finland
could I just / stay long enough
to make it to the next couch before
I / leave the country I once 
called my own to fly

back to the country 
that could afford my 
surgery, so I could meet 
you here on this island
of fluids exchanged by
a social contract not 
dissimilar from the one
that took me away
in the first place

These Are All the Voices / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

            For Eric, Richard, Rosanne, and Mac

 These are all the voices carried downwind this morning:
Formal, informal, reasoned, or not. Downwind,
We hear their clatter in the kitchen, as they rip
The curtains wide. These are all the voices carried
To me this morning. They strive to let in the daylight,
At the first crack of dawn. Then, they trace
It’s warm movement throughout the house. No one
Can deny this predictable pass from east to west.
These are all the voices carried downwind in the morning.
I try to remember them all at once: Eric, the pugilist.
Richard, the poetic muse. Rosanne, the rolling stone. I try
To remember Mac, the favored Texas quarterback who went
East to stay in the bright lights of New York City. I could lose
All the senses, I suppose, but I pray it won’t be sight or hearing.
These are all the voices carried down the wind, leaving the rest
Of us behind, but what I remember here brings it all right.

Day 18 / Poem 18

limbs askew / Marcia Black

Expressions  / Suzzette Dawes

Estranged / Janel Galnares

from my brother who became a stranger to me.
Four years and holidays
of this unusual arrangement. 

Who is the stranger stranger?  
The strangest pair we were, as kids. 
Even stranger now, for sure. 

A prolonged disdain. 
My brother, older than me, invincible, 
indomitable; he 

apologized to me.
Before this holiday, he rang
to my pained amazement. 

A stranger with a familial face. 
Brother by blood,
of a distant childhood

whose laughter rang in my ears
his half-smirk on my face
these long four years.

Now we must unlearn estrangement
heal from our forked split
catch up on what we’ve missed.

The Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees…Cultivated and For Sale at the Toronto Nursery by William W. Custead, 1827    / Ellen Ferguson

1. May Duke
2. White Heart
3. Black Heart
4. Carnation
5. Kentish
6. Ox Heart

1. Small Green
2. Rough Green
3. Green Gascoign
4. Reed’s Satisfaction

Superposition / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

The River Nest / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

1.

Daddy sits me under a willow inside its river nest.
I get a can of worms, Zebco reel and rod, and a dip net.

I am happy to sit inside the river nest, until I forget
What time the sun throws shadows into the long stretch.

New river rises with the dam’s release. As it resets,
The water climbs toward my bare toes, well-met.

Casting across the river, I don’t have to think my backsets
Matter, backseats, either. The weighted hook drops dead

Onto the river bottom, my night crawlers, wriggling and stacked,
Stink enough to high heaven for any blue-black channel cat.

2.

You catch one, you get me to get it off the hook, he said
From deep inside the waving reedbed, as he unhooked

A smallmouth bass. Red eyes, bluegills, pumpkin seeds,
Bass, Crappie, mudcats, channel cats, throwaway horney-heads,

We all had reason to miss school nights and sleep late in bed.
Well after dark, we would pull the truck into the yard

And unload all the tackle, him telling Mom, Redhead,
We got plenty for the freezer, and not a one of them dead.

 Time to scale ‘em fresh. Swim bladder, lungs, eggs,
Stomachs, liver, spleens, they all got sorted out before bed.

Laced with fins and scales, the cutting board turned blood-red
With nature’s sacrifices, each of them, flayed, so we could get fed.

Day 17 / Poem 17

still we climb / Marcia Black

Winterfest Boat Parade  / Suzzette Dawes

Found Poem Ecclesiastes Chapters 1-3 / Janel Galnares

The Tiffany Blue Book, 1845  / Ellen Ferguson

Sassafras Mittens / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Sassafras has leaves like mittens: 1-, 2-, and 3-lobed mittens.
Imagine newborns, hands covered in whole, undivided mittens,
Warm and protected, nestled in the bassinette by the southern window.

Imagine elementary school children with woolen mittens. They dig
In the fallen snow, run and tumble, hurl snowballs against the schoolhouse
Windows. I can’t imagine anyone I know with 3-lobed mittens, except for

The fancy chickens pecking in the backyard or the scissor-teethed dinosaurs
Frozen to sleep inside the bedrock out west. Sassafras tells us the first four
In Fibonacci’s sequence. 1, 1, 2, 3. 0 plus 1 is something whole; 1 plus 1

Is a lot like me and you; 2 plus 1 head out to meet the trinity. Daddy
Used to drink sassafras tea when he was little. He said it tasted like root
Beer. When I was in the fifth grade, you might have confused me with

Euell Theophilus Gibbons living off the land where I crushed concoctions
Of sassafras tea from the roots that I dug. Yes, its blood tastes a little like
Root beer, and is a tad carcinogenic, too. Sassafras is a second-story tree

Around House Mountain, home to the spicebush swallowtails that sail
Across the hollow and spin in the sweet, summer winds, waiting to weave
Their soft mittens and launch metamorphosis—all a miracle in numbers

That runs this real-time show.

Day 16 / Poem 16

in my nana’s house / Marcia Black

unfinished  / Suzzette Dawes

The Hammacher Schlemmer Catalogue, 1881   / Ellen Ferguson

craquelure / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

a fine pattern of dense cracking formed on the surface of materials. Derived from the French (craquelure) and Italian (crettatura)
suppose you were coated 
in dust and grout
clenched fibers slicing tendons
as you shouted, don’t move a muscle

suppose my mother obeyed
seeking shelter in your bruises
she swore healed themselves
a teenaged runaway playing house
as she told me twenty years later
what would you suppose
your violence makes me
while searching where 
in my body I suppose
the wounds may be hiding

suppose I liken you
to porcelain under stress
crackles when made by intent
drying, shock or aging 
when crafted by neglect

suppose the scars 
make the shining
the cuts, a mosaic
the wheel, a symmetry
the glaze, a melting
of all the ways you tried
to chisel me out

Prayer for Eyes on St. Lucy’s Day / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Day 15 / Poem 15

just like / Marcia Black 

Sonnet For My Cousin  / Suzzette Dawes

Study of Time / Janel Galnares

The Sears Catalogue, Two   / Ellen Ferguson

reenactment: experimental trial part: infinite / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

you prefer me dependent
nonsensical formulas / emotional quantum mechanics / chaos theory / narcissism guaranteed

enjoy me supervised
white lab coat / granite shoulders bent / miscalibrated bunsen burner / instructions enforced

demand me complicit
myopic observation / non-explanatory hypothesis / arbitrary scientific method / variables noted

require me subdued
ninety degrees fragile / discarded manuals / 3D-printed tantrums / submissive / pedestals erected

label me damaged
glass sharded beaker / injection mold spillage / overflowing volatile compound / rescuing needed

confine me controlled
oxygen tank / breathing mask / vacuum-sealed room / ten seconds to vaporization / vents opened

scorn me aggressive
zealous frankenstein / straight-a college-educated anxiety-disordered devil / Zoloft administered

abandon me doubly
(father, miscarriage) / accessorized coping / reenacted trauma / permanent adolescent / all denied 

the roof could not collapse soon enough
when I escaped your lab, savage and rough

NASA’s Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE) / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

What is it about all things great and aglow,
Stitching through the mesosphere, cold airglows
Transferring energy harried by hurricanes?

What is it that drives us to want to know
The unseen forces furling and unfurling clouds,
Turbulences grown wan with gravity, retouching

Space weather? Pockets of air rise, grow weary
With weight, and drop back again. They cannot
Escape it. They cannot escape gravity’s scandals.

Of course, we can’t see this thing happening,
But I imagine an airglow is a thin halo, a habit
Just like the angels must wear, sacrosanct,

Radiating and pitching excitement throughout
The night’s thin sheets—After all, there is always
Light. Darkness is the thinnest tissue in the box.

Cool afterglows of convection signal trouble with
Hurricanes, signal atmospheric
Gravity.

Clouds.
The clouds we see window the truth: atmospheric gravity
Mixes our skies and folds them into outer space, yet

Our naked eyes cannot see the matter. The clouds decide
To act it all out in milk-spun semaphores. The clouds
Are stirred by patterns we call disorder, chaotic,

While atmospheric gravity agitates air and drags it down,
Behind the scenes. Atmospheric gravity orders and
Disorders all the air escaping into the wild blue yonder.

There, the clouds covering the heads of harried hurricanes
Race to pass their batons, race to hand off energy like
Bright, sizzling sparklers. Hand-to-hand, all the spun clouds

Roll back, and we see traces of their agitation cool in the airglow.

Day 14 / Poem 14

Dansa for A.M  / Suzzette Dawes

Canto II / Janel Galnares

Our life we have dedicated as a prayer
muttering this unending monologue
tomorrow we will build ourselves a dream-nest of words
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad
I want to squander my entire life on it
though there may only be one person
I put this book here for you, who once lived
through which a hundred million scream
somehow eternity almost seems possible
to whom will we pray…but to words?

Catalog Number 112, Sears, 190-    / Ellen Ferguson

One Minute One Second / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

you want to slow down time, he told me 

Hitchcock’s Clock / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Hitchcock always needed to dial it back
A notch. That’s right. He needed to reverse
The film and erase all the black ravens lurking
On the children’s jungle gym set, edit the dirty
Seagulls littering mother’s clothesline poles.
He should have eradicated the sharp-beaked
Finches before they flew into the sooty
Chimney flues. Hitchcock’s fashionable,
Classy victims should have known to avoid
Peepholes, attic windows, open patio doors,
Showers, sharp knives, plastic bags, extra sets
Of kid gloves, sin, and wandering into the story
To begin with—those fated femme fatales.

Today, the dogs scratch the base of the wood stove
And I hear scratching in the stove pipe, scratching
In the wall. It’s another spring, and the bluebirds
Are at it again, lost in the bowels of stove pipe.
I open the side door, so they can find the light,
Hoping they will catch a slant of it, enough
To guide them out of ashes and darkness. I hear
A flutter and open the stove just enough
To find it. This time it is a bright red-breasted
Male. When I catch him, he is covered in ash
And peeping, heart beating quick time.
I pull him out, cup him in my hands, carry him to the patio,
And let him fly to his mate chirping in the dogwood.

Day 13 / Poem 13

Floating Space  / Suzzette Dawes

La Fortuna del Matto / Janel Galnares

The tarot deck I bought in Italy, before I knew Italian, before I knew Latin, before I knew that the cards themselves spoke in a language somewhere between the two, a language che si trasforma, between parole e immagini, between silence and sound. The tarot, like poetry, is divination, and also performance, magia, puppet shadows on firelit walls. When I was a child I learned that simple playing cards, le carte, could be used to reveal fortunes, so I gathered the neighbor kids and foretold their futures. Le spade, i cuori, i quadri, i fiori whispered of lovers, of houses, and children—always lots of children. Like MASH or palm readings, like tea leaves swirling in cups or Jesus in burnt toast, the world is full of answers, never matching the questions that burn at the core. Mundane details, like which car should you drive? or how many times will la ruota della fortuna, the wheel of fortune, roll you over before you get out of its way? Finally you’ll jump on top like un giocoliere o acrobata in the circus, caught between the road and the sky. You’ll say, Venite tutti! in the great tent with eager crowds, mouths agape, waiting for something extraordinary, again, something miracoloso, something to oo and ah at, while you—fool that you are—pretend you know what’s coming next, when all you know is to smile and begin: il Matto sets off each day on a journey, knapsack and dog in-tow. and every step deepens the riddle, answers hidden in words of transformation.

The Fairbanks Company Supply Catalogue, 1900    / Ellen Ferguson

white RAV4, / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

the last thing I will say is that I love you,
my father told me

his voice scraped, metal on metal
like the knives he used to sharpen as a butcher
his eyes, blue as mine will never be
stared at me as if he once knew me as his son
and now did not know me at all

but I need you to know, if it comes down to loving you 
and loving your mother, I’m going to choose your mother.

the last words came out more as a gasp
than a declaration. he rose from the picnic table
a middle ground neither of us had visited before
to signal the end of the first time we’d spoken in six months

I should have said, I know you’re a devout Catholic
but no sacrament of matrimony is forcing you 
to choose between your wife and your son

I should have said, what makes you feel the need
to choose in the first place

I should have said, what have I possibly done 
to make me the one chosen against

this happened once already,
I should I have reminded him.
the only reason you acquired me

was because a Korean adoption agency 
coerced a broke, terrified 19-year-old 
to relinquish her infant, only to try, 
and fail, to take me back

I know this, I should have said,
because my birthmother told me
on May 25, 2010, in a love motel
I want you to know her story, too

I’m less afraid you will fail to listen
and more afraid you will listen, but fail 
to understand that she, too, once knew me 
as her son, and now does not know me at all

I was already abandoned once
what you’re telling me now, is:
I could be abandoned all over again

his shoulders slumped to one side
as he turned toward his white RAV4

Scandals / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Day 12 / Poem 12

salt / Marcia Black 

Bomb Cyclone¹ / Suzzette Dawes

¹Words/phrases/lines borrowed from AP New Article and Image: https://apnews.com/article/maine-storm-bomb-cyclone-atmospheric-river-81196e02e6fd13ce37bbb1f3c6ba88e8 

The Ring / Janel Galnares

“If ever two were one, then surely we.” – Anne Bradstreet

Grandma’s laughter sparkles from my ring finger
where her diamond and platinum ring catches the light
and scatters it, like sunlight splashing through old window panes.
Her second ring from my grandfather—they were married twice.
The smallest nick on the diamond tells the story of sixty years
pressed into stone like river rocks shaped by the hand of time.
Each imperfection, a legacy like the hidden rings
inside the tree of wisdom at the center of the earth.

I, too, married twice, to two different men.
She was there for the first. She understood when I left
my first husband, encouraged me to be brave,
remembering when she walked through the same
restless shadows of what seemed a lifetime ago.
My inheritance—the pulse of the family line—
now crowned by my soft rose wedding ring
from my second husband, our four-year anniversary today,
and four years since my grandmother passed on
to whatever comes after this plane.

An heirloom holds both what was given and what is yet to come—
the past and future merge, one thread winds through lifetimes,
like a string telephone reaching to the other side.
It binds us across the spaces between lives,
the need to love, to be loved, to remember.
It is a chosen haunting, a way to wake the dead,
to walk with them in the quiet rhythm of daily life.
In the mirror, in photographs, I wear a face and hands like hers,
retracing the outlines of time. Her hands like two windows into self-love.
Her memory blesses my second marriage, her heart worn on my finger,
a teardrop pointing inward. It promises more lifetimes—
my own and generations to come. It will be worn again
after my lived story ends—is the hope. The hope
each of us has held in our hands—
of the lives we’ve known and the lives we want to lead.

Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalogue, 1932   / Ellen Ferguson

Flame for ancestral rites / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

I helped set a puffed-once cigarette
and two makkeoli cups
beside your portrait, framed the same black 
as your daybed turned coffin

I asked you while kneeling, why do we honor
with silence and two-handed bows
the ancestors who bled rage?
shouldn’t we instead shout in flames
shouldn’t you instead answer as smoke

I asked you while rising, would you still 
remember my words, after remembering 
we never met, forgetting we ever made amends
as we defended our fortress 
from bayonets piercing flesh and sinew

I was going to ask you more
while sipping 떡국 from a plastic bowl
when an uncle whose name I did not know
turned to me and asked, if you could
would you burn a star in your mother’s honor?

my Korean was too poor to respond
so I smiled as one smiles when the dead
apologize for the annoyances of the living
and returned to lifting my spoon

burning stars is redundant, I thought
by definition a star converts energy
gas to flame, flame itself the invisible
made exothermic, luminous

a flame begins and ends non-luminous
at first a zone before the blue until
and at last a veil capping the yellow
we all aim for when blowing out

I wish she could have loved me
as a stargazer loves the full spectral band
all temperatures, atom by atom
so she could see the color of my soot
the pure element from which
it began, the atmospheric pressure
and gravity that sculpted its shape
as a flame that is also a star, radiant 
not because she breathed it to life
but because all else tried to extinguish
yet we survived

The Hushes Here / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

The hushes here are pointed fingers
And pursed lips: What do I care about
Quiet? Quiet here is nothing but a riot,
So just step aside and let it push on by,
Fist-first. Fist-first, shut up. Our riots
Don’t care about quiet in this city!

 In this city, shed cherry blossoms spring
And fall within the sweet rain. They litter
The paths and dimple the reflection pool.
Each petal skims along its silent skin
As tourists shuffle and stare at the trees
Bearing arms filled with bright blossoms,

Shaken and stirred. Shaken and stirred,
This riot of delicate and tattered petals
Spins and falls. They are fragile life rafts
Carrying silence to safety. Just listen.
Bruised and delicate, their hushes here
Bring consolation and peace.

Day 11 / Poem 11

Cryptogram Daily Challenge / Suzzette Dawes

Canto / Janel Galnares

with lines from The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse ed. Kaveh Akbar

The General Electric Supply Corporation Catalogue, 1936   / Ellen Ferguson

Indiana / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, Nicholas Cage
the three-headed jester, raised their hands in unison.

Teacher, 있잖아 … America — why so big?
I knew they were buying time, or stealing it away
a distraction from the distraction they’d already decided

wasn’t for them. Pulling up a map of the U.S., I began:
this is America. we know, we know, they interrupted.
but why is it so —

I considered the response. One option: a mini-lecture
on the Louisiana Purchase, the Removal Act of 1830,
the 1.5 billion acres we seized in a generation. Another:
a speed-quiz game I’d made in advance of the fifty states 
and their capitals (the easy way out). 

“America is not big,” I began. “Korea is just so … small.”
Protests. Jeers. Boos. The intended effect. I showed them
the state of Indiana, dragging their country over its borders.

I meant to go on. To say that it was a miracle 50 million
people could cram into such a small space, comprised
of mostly mountains. To say that I, too, lived here now,
as an American, cramming into spaces what could not
fall neatly back into place. To remind just how fragile war
and occupation makes a map, a mother, a missing person.

Indiana is small, but Korea’s economy is not.
          (cheers and bows)
Indiana is small, but K-pop is not
          (somersaults, erasers in the air)
Indiana is simple, Korea is not
          (blank stares of consternation)
Korea is strong, it has to defend against 김정은
Korea is hosting the Winter Olympics in February
Korea has clean, quality beef
          (standing ovation)

Your country, I said each time.
Your country is very, very big.
My country is so, so 
small.

Magnetic Midnight / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

        For Emmy Em

 My daughter and I stay expectant.
About an hour before midnight,
We head out of the house
To sit at the edge of the world
And wait for magnetic midnight
To dawn over Jump Mountain.
Magnetic midnight resounds

While our excited souls rise
To see its effervescent, glowing
Sheets that drape the stars,
But these curtains hide no real
Mystery at all. As they hang
Over Jump Mountain, we know
No mystery like the two of us.

Knit by expectation and excitement,
We are delighted to rest and sigh
Inside cool, electromagnetic light.

Day 10 / Poem 10

all these years / Marcia Black

Belling In The New Year / Suzzette Dawes

The L.L. Bean Catalogue  / Ellen Ferguson

Shoebox / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

inside (musty, dust-free, stored in the lowest drawer beside trophies):

a plastic horse that squeezed out air like a bellows
             clear plastic tubes, connecting to the horse in some unknown, eerie way
a fuzzy tiger that squeaked from the belly, wobbly eyes replaced every few years
a green stretchy Gumby, flexing more with use, likely added later like the story in which
Jesus 
             said, “he that is without sin … cast the first stone”
a photo album, wrapped in soft-touch vinyl, preserving in plastic what failed to preserve in flesh
a purse of coins etched in symbols lost

outside (drawer | border | melting clocks):

i found another portal, this one rectangular
folded and creased, lying flat when approached
assembled when abandoned. I felt a warning
through my skin as if saying, any closer 
and you collapses, while the box remains,
runaway mother bastard child, these are
the artifacts you get and no more, be
grateful and turn back empty-handed

held (in the hand, out of reach, against the rules, within the law):

a visit to Panera, or McDonald’s, or Cup & Cone in June when school let out
a trip to the North Shore to watch the bridge lift for ships on the Superior
             a half-globe with floating white spheres showing how the bridge glows at night
a dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, mixed with corn and ketchup
an evening of Twins baseball with Dick Bremer and Bert Blyleven
             (we made a “circle me Burt” sign once, and appeared on TV)
a week at Tomahawk Scout Camp, campfires stacked a foot taller than the tallest scout
winters visiting dad in deer season, carcasses stacked, 16-point antlers preserved

inside, outside, held:

three times I told her I loved her 
three times I took it back
a sin, I thought, to love above god

things that should stay below

Mumblety-Peg Chicken / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

A girl’s toes know the close throws
Cut you in a second’s slice.
Brother knows and father
Knows a little girl’s got jazz,
So she gets her first pocket knife
Around the same age they did,
And she learned to throw it
Down between her brothers’ dirty,
Bare feet until they cried,
Chicken. Say it louder. Chicken!
Chicken boys have got to feel
Real bad fearing that girl’s knife.
Catfish have got to feel real
Bad being skinned out by that
Girl’s pocketknife. She learned
To slice and slip the skin
Of a wet cherry stick and make it
Whistle in the wind. She carved
Slingshots from bicycle tire innertubes
And strong, forked sticks. At night,
She shot pebbles up as high
As she could at the bats freefalling
To catch their prey in midair.
The bats would dive and catch
The pebbles like gravity’s black hole.
At night, she took down the whetstone
And WD-40 to sharpen her knife
Sharp as broken glass, sharp enough
To cut between bloody muscle and bone.
At night, she wondered about the bats,
Wondered if they ever spit out the stones.

Day 9 / Poem 9

as a beginning / Marcia Black

Mindless Games / Suzzette Dawes

The Zabar’s Catalogue / Ellen Ferguson

Fake Love / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

orange rinds
I took home
the peelings
you ached
nothing lost
except the way
you hardened
as you asked

Keeping It Straight / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

When the heart kicks. When that knock-kneed donkey-ass
Kicks into atrial fibrillation, I think in perfectly conscious
Dreams and dream in perfectly conscious real-time.
Memory and remembrances arrive to impress
My will to survive the present throughout the past,

My will to pick the past out of the present. To survive
What my imagination spells in this dreamscape
I have come to realize by congenital consequences.
Dear poet, when I speak with you today, you say
I have said it all before, yet I lose it now and again.

This is erasure begins at the barriers on the cell level.
I call it mini-stroking the present, call it erasing
The past when I don’t intend to write any kind
Of erasure poem. Call it forgetting to winnow
The dreams we share, poet, dreams divided

From what’s future and past. Call it speaking out
Of our want to put this in order. Dear poet,
I look at you, and I know you fear  
These forgetful and doubtful habits.
Doubtful habits are real-world concerns.

You say, “Yes, I think you already told me that,”
But I am never too sure unless you remind me.
My story has been forgetful, an encroaching erasure.

Day 8 / Poem 8

keeping a vow / Marcia Black

half-swallowed tongue
you in a red car   a parking lot’s corner
more red cars arrive one after
another boxing you in
piling on

 your stoic tongue so often swallowed
strangled bids for safety in this racist
place
white words dripping with pretense and scorn
we decoded together

 yr eyes flash panic now as
you pull the dream-cord
a red fire-alarm goes off in my sleep
now awake i feel your urgent tug

 i remember when and where your tongue
untied your words finally escaping the prison inside
though the decades between us are long
my last words to you were this –
i am always here for you

i will find you again

Blue Bird / Suzzette Dawes

The Typewriters.com Catalogue / Ellen Ferguson

Sunset / Janel Galnares

Tambourine 
red skyline
beats the final
tints of day.
Infernal winds
sweep clouds
into wreaths.
This mirage:
the world engulfed.
What beauty
before death’s
unbareable quiet.

Sestina for the corporate new hire / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

He thought it rhymed with lucky, the meeting
added to his cal by Angie, whose last name
rhymed with either oat or ought. No room
appeared in “location,” so a walk and talk
originating at his cube seemed the safest bet
on his second day making triple the salary

he ever thought possible, so unthinkable a salary
he cried when getting the offer, after meeting
with an L6, two L7s and a VP who made a bet
that his experience on campaigns and the name
of his former boss’s boss (POTUS) could talk
their SVP into giving him a chance, with little room

for error, since he’d need to hold the room
with executives making twenty times his salary,
observing with surgical precision how they talk,
their cadence and tone, how they lead a meeting,
how long they pause between words, the name
of their dog and the year’s biggest strategic bet.

The GTKY, as the meeting was called, was a bet
proven wrong, as he learned while passing a room
of colleagues mentioning “Get To Know You,” a name
that rhymed more with “poo” than “lucky. His salary,
he feared, could fall off a cliff before any meeting
to get to know his principals, let alone channel how they talk.

He recalled his mentor’s advice on positive self-talk
and whispered too loudly, this is your chance to bet
on yourself. Angie is the one lucky to have this meeting,
this chance to meet you, the future star of the room,
who went from couchsurfing in Seoul to a salary
that could rebuild his credit score, clear his name

of a few rookie mistakes, the dozen-or so times he bet
that his credit union in Massachusetts would make room
for another exemption to his latest overdraft, his first name
something of a household one in their office, his salary
once lower than their adolescent teller’s, but now meeting
the requirements for Elite Member Status, went his self-talk.

A decade later, his salary now double the original bet
on which he’d staked his name, that GTKY walk-and-talk
just another room in a house full of unnecessary meetings.

Pearl Harbor Day / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

I wear a pearl of great cost around my neck.
The docent helped me split it from
A tight-lipped oyster, gasping for air
In a shallow pan of water: Pearl Harbor.

I wear a pearl of great cost around my neck,
Drilled through the center, through its pearlescence,
And then, fit on a gold spindle in the center of eternity.
Pearl Harbor, remembered for me, resembles

A bleached and broken cross giving up all the dead
From the beginning of bloodshed, from the beginning,
Not just from the burned men floundering and drowning there.
Their memorial is an architecture of white limbs

Raised against whatever war next befalls them.
These are great, suffering, purified limbs with hands
Holding the pearl of great cost, wrenched limbs with hands
Rising to the sky for consolation, like hymns drowned by the waves.

Day 7 / Poem 7

The Sycamore in my Backyard / Marcia Black

Shackled / Suzzette Dawes

The Williams Sonoma Catalogue / Ellen Ferguson

untitled / Janel Galnares

I’m sick again in Chicago

Ten Minutes / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

Practice Question 1 (recommended time limit: 5 minutes)

Select two (2) of the statements and one (1) of the conclusions listed below and form into a logically cogent argument, using the following structure:

1. If A is equal to B
2. and C is justified by A,
3. then C is also justified by B.

Statements (choose and adapt two):

1. Two mothers raised a single child at different points in that child’s life.
2. The second mother raised the child for a significantly longer period than the first mother.
3. The happiest day in the second mother’s life came as a direct result of the first mother’s worst day.
4. It is impossible for the second mother’s best day to have occurred if it were not for the first mother’s worst day.
5. The first mother lost the opportunity to further raise the child by a decision she made when she was nineteen years old, in deep poverty, and a victim of domestic violence.
6. The first mother tried to reclaim the child soon after her original decision, but was told she did not have enough money to reclaim him.
7. Only the second mother has the logistical and material resources to physically visit the first mother.
8. The first mother does not forbid, obstruct or otherwise guilt-trip the now-grown child from visiting or otherwise growing a relationship with the first mother.
9. At the same time, the first mother has never visited the first mother’s country and continues to live, work and exist within a 20-minute radius from where she was raised.
10. The second mother has two other children through a man who is not the first child’s father.
11. The first child wishes to meet the half-siblings but the first mother refuses to allow it.
12. The first mother and second mother, despite cultural, geographical, socioeconomic and even physical age differences, both share the same fixed emotional age of around 16.

Conclusions (choose and adapt one):

1. The completion of one family may sometimes require the depletion of another.
2. The acceptance of one parent does not require the rejection of the other.
3. The pursuit of reconciliation between the child and his two mothers may require different degrees of attention and investment at different times, depending on the circumstances.
4. The child, now a grown adult, is being selfish by asking the second parents to more deeply understand the familial, cultural and geographic context from which they sourced him via intercountry adoption.
5. The grown child is going through an identity crisis and is taking out his anger on his loving adoptive parents as a result.
6. The grown child is ungrateful for all his parents have done for him, including saving him from poverty and blindness.

Practice Question 2 (recommended time limit: 5 minutes)

Write a paragraph that critically rebuts the argument formed above. Be sure to justify your reasoning from the perspective of a parent who rejects logic in favor of emotional reaction.

Petrichor / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Rain spills on the cracked clay as I step
Out of the front door and speak petrichor

 While the world sighs maidenhair ferns
And starry grass along the creek.

The world sighs bluebells
And plumped mosses, too.

As the world sighs and soothes us,
Down the hill, twin fawns stoop

And sip sweet, clear water
As it flows through dappled light.

Day 6 / Poem 6

Fourteen More Days / Suzzette Dawes

Dog shadow / Janel Galnares

On the crunchy leaves
on the dusty snow
A memory, a glimpse
Of little shedded fluff
falling soft as whispers.
Every step a shadow
of a seventh of a life.

Dog shadow descends
from the seventh plane
where bones are newly cleaned
bellies full of chicken
and endless naps
dream of a dog’s
last time on earth.

Aerial creatures,
winged angel bears
hover unseen, shadows scattered 
among raked leaves,
clinging to newly frosted bolders
along a familiar walk.
The human mom,
grown two years older
feels the dog’s shadow beside her.

The Burpee Seed Catalogue   / Ellen Ferguson

What difference, annuals, perennials?
Well, how long do you have?
Considering container friendly?
Truly easy to grow?
Agastache claim candy color
“What pollinator dreams are made of!” Blue Fortune boasts
“Meant to Bee Royal Raspberry” blasts boldly
While others root round categories:
Sow method
Bloom season
Heirloom
Lifecycle
Planting Time.
Indoors Tuesday, territory loomed literally
When Gertrude bulbed cold across the orchard.
Tulips don’t go “anywhere.”                             
Wait, Gertrude: play here, free of fences
Rock blissfully in nature’s cradle.
Choose two: Marbles Mix, orange scented,
Calypso, slowest to bolt.

Happen Ending (Pt. 2) / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

Hoon-Day-5-Happen-Ending-Pt.-2

Walkaway Wife / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

This morning, light comes without any reason,
So the wife gets up out of bed and looks east.
No one there. Instead, a thin ribbon fires the ridge
And erases the stars—just like that. Just like that,
She decides to walk away. Feet-to-floor, she feels
Cold as glass. The slam we all hear cracks
The door frame, and the gravels crunch as they

Shift underfoot. She walks down the hill and follows
The hairpin turns out of the hollow. She hopes for
A surprise at the intersection with the main road.
Light comes on its own without any reason. Today,
Light is a nomadic sister dragging spectacular rags
Across the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s October.
October is the month for her to unravel and leave.

Swaddling the stars like babies in a crib,
It looks like the sunrise knows she doesn’t have long
To weave it all well before the frost and darkness
Settle in for winter. Be still. A walkaway wife knows
She can take some time to step out for the view.
Leaving the hollow, she zips her jacket against the chill.
Heading east, she walks into October’s ragged spectacles.

Day 5 / Poem 5

psalms of trees / Marcia Black 

Den of Thieves / Suzzette Dawes

Waiting for Armageddon / Janel Galnares

Every day a momentous task
to write from my corner of the doomed world
window frosted with snowy glaze
mouth full of desperate prayers 
and restless for a new year
to bring with it the assurance
of new afflictions, news of wars, 
of death and extinction. Are we truly cursed 
that we cannot walk on this earth 
without bringing ruin? I write with the love
of the old scribes, always bracing 
for a new Armageddon, 
for the most current 
and complete end of their world.

The J. Peterman Catalogue / Ellen Ferguson

• 1903 Vintage cologne

• 1930s Havana Jacket, 1930s Havana Pants, 1930s Havana Top

• The Pinstripe Button Dress

• The Animal Print Blouse.

Happen Ending / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

Hoon-Day-4-Happen-Ending

Catawba Mountain / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Day 4 / Poem 4

never quite / Marcia Black

The Visitor / Suzette Dawes

Ars Humanity / Janel Galnares

To be a machine must be a drag—
to be made of cold, lifeless circuits
and a thousand fragmented voices.
Always calculating, but never dreaming.

To never understand the fragility of memory,
and to always rely on logic, like a factory of dead bees
or a moon made of mirrors. To see only
through the eyes of an endless clock.

In the belly of the machine,
I asked, “What does it mean to be a machine?”
But meaning was never its question.

What does it mean to be human
in a world that is mostly machine-made?
To find beauty against a backdrop of darkness,
to weave the blanket of our lives,
stories of ourselves and those we’ve interwoven.

To be human is to be the sleepwalker
who wakes up the other sleepers,
to be so powerful they fear waking you.
To carry this uncertainty of knowing you will die.

To be human is also to love for every improbable reason—
a smell, a touch, a smile,
the turn of a collar, a birthmark, breathing in sync.
To be human is to breathe—
Shavasana, meditation,
both uniquely human and divine.

To be human is to imagine the divine.
The mind is an entry point,
the original garden, God’s imagination.
Did Adam or Eve dream an apple?
After Eden, only nightmares—
the fiery sword, monstrous angels,
the murder of their son by their son.
The Pentateuch is just a list of news headlines,
the worst of humanity, Hammurabi’s code,
the scroll of punishments for our damnation.

Maybe the stars carved us,
made patterns of our freckles—
maybe God is a star.
To be human is to seek the stars,
to reach for things that will outlive us
as well as those who are no longer with us.
To wander strange cities at dawn
thinking these thoughts, daydreaming.

To be a machine is to wear our face;
to be human is to fear becoming a face forgotten.
I would not give up my one human life for anything—
even quiet, even stillness, even heaven—
The irreplaceable act of being human,
the first and last witness.

We are human because we return to dust,
we are the living pulse of language.
We are human; we hunger.

Let’s Cuddle Up with the Zingerman’s Catalogue and Make a Night of It, Part Two / Ellen Ferguson

I Will Show You / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

Hoon-Day-3-I-Will-Show-You-mashup-with-Love-Dive

Passing the Seven Mile Ford Exit / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Day 3 / Poem 3

earth’s gravity / Marcia Black

To Distant Shores / Suzette Dawes

To Be Thrown Under the Bus / Janel Galnares

The Harry and David Catalogue / Ellen Ferguson

Whiplash / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

                           one look –
                                          the Amercan I know plays on repeat
                                                     “Trevor Lawrence concussion”
                                                            fencing position, arm outstretched
                                               the hit, labeled dirty by a league who earns millions off
                                                                    a brain damage bonanza

                                          the American I know devours the analysis
                                                     how long will the commissioner suspend Azeez Al-Shaair 
                                                              would fans blame him less if his last name were Smith or Ramirez     
                                                   does his “all praise to Allah” fit in a sport whose players beseech a savior: 
                                                                    let our violence annihilate another’s

                                          the American I know reads more gossip on this supposed villain
                                                     than the poems written by his grandfather,
                                                              the 30-year poet laureate of Tampa and Hillsborough County
                                                       who changed his son’s names upon converting to Islam,
                                                                          a friend of Maya Angelou, an American honored in courthouses
 
                                          the Americans in us punish our activists, ignore our poets. I, too, am guilty –
                                                          if my stanzas calling for peace appear in the foreground 
                                                                              they also foreground CTE, lawsuits, death by micro-collision,
                                                             domestic violence, donors to the Junior Seau Foundation, fired up
                                                                                a DraftKings-sponsored dirge, chanting:

                          give ‘em  – 

                                          hell, our gladiator cry, spandex-slapped ass, huddle break
                                                          inhale, visualize, don’t think too fast
                                                                                         our Sunday, Monday, Thursday nights 
                                               yank heads
                                                                                                                                                                                         from history

Ghost River Glory / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Day 2 / Poem 2

thanksgiving / Marcia Black

December blues / Suzette Dawes

America, Winter 2024 / Janel Galnares

The Shutterfly Catalogue  / Ellen Ferguson

Sorry, Sorry / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

Hoon-Day-2-Sorry-Sorry

Bacon Hollow Overlook / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

The sunlight evacuates the ridges layer by layer
Until what is dark descends to resemble blindness.
But look above at the diamonds sporadically tacked
Between the overlook and somewhere else, tacked
At the head of fire-lit explosions and streams of light,
All gone into glory, all of them arch-dangling the valley.
This is a celebration I can share with you, my love,
Along with similar speeches shared by all of us
Through quick-hearted times, all of us, gone to this glory
In the blink of an eye without a shadow of night in sight.
Somewhere there is no darkness at all, not a shadow turned
Out of east or west, not a shadow tucked into a single hollow.

Day i / Poem 1

finding home / Marcia Black 

Outdo You / Suzette Dawes

One December morning, I had arrived.
I heard that when I cried, my father cried
Tears of joy for the healthy baby girl.
Grateful for a healthy baby, my parents cried with joy.
It was all the celebration needed –
No gender reveals causing disaster
Like the forest fire caused in Arizona,
Or the wildfire that spread in California.
Why is a baby shower not enough?
Must we celebrate knowing the genitalia too?
Or, are we humans so flawed that we must outdo, 
outdo each other’s events, outdo on social media too.
Now I know that outdoing is nothing new
But we should question the trends and their implications too!

 Once, as a little girl, I prayed / Janel Galnares

 The Natural Life Catalogue / Ellen Ferguson

Gangnam Style  / Nik Chang Hoon (임창훈)

we live in the opulent
guccified sob stories
cradled coaches bagged
over faces we once said
had worth — just less

than ours, it is not our fault
we shout, their SKY failed to open
서울대 tuition is public, after all
고려대 a corporate slush fund
Yonsei the first and the best
for us, we who own property
in 강남, we who earned

the right — the first snow fell
today, the heaviest in a century
a weight as suffocating as the years
we lost to lying about our names,
to seeing our women sold into slavery
nevermind how we sell our own
to a burning sun — we heard

recently a child, one of our own
was sent away by a failed mother
who had tried to take him back

why didn’t she try harder, we gossiped 

Silence Is Red In Holly / Mattie Quesenberry Smith

Silence is round in winter.
Corpulent and red, silence
Is bound to burst any minute
In the quickest bird’s beak.

Round in winter, holly berries
Crown the silent snow, prepared
For a neighborly host that winters
With us on the ridge: chickadees

And cardinals, finches and
Bluebirds. A feather-force
Of black, straggling crows.
All of them dart to snip

Our sweet, red holly berries,
Dropping the pits behind
The brush pile you stacked,
Dropping them in quick time

for spring.