Welcome to the 30/30 Project, an extraordinary challenge and fundraiser for Tupelo Press, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary press. Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a “poetry marathon,” writing 30 poems in 30 days, while the rest of us “sponsor” and encourage them every step of the way.
The volunteer poets for June 2023 are Jane Elias, Alix Jason, Heather Katzoff, Jessica Kinnison, Jessica Letteney, Khaya Osborne, P.F. Potvin, Jenny Stohlman, and Hailey Williams. Read their full bios here.
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
A BULLET IN THE GRASS / A Cento composed by Khaya Osborne,
with lines from Jane Elias, Alix Jason, Heather Katzoff, Jessica Kinnison, Jessica Letteney, Khaya Osborne, P.F. Potvin, Jenny Stohlman, and Hailey Williams.
Eyes flickered over me and I did not drown.
Livestock and humans, we like to get our heads
stuck into things. Yes, the stars spark with each coyote
yip. I see branches bounce under squirrel seduction.
I want to stash my pores in my pockets–all the jupiterian
ailments haunt my bloodline. we sing with sewn down tongues,
a hubristic fist. debt is a form of grief that you drink slowly
with a straw. languages unknown both ocean and human.
The beach will never be tacky just windy with jokes
about how it all turns to dust. Gone is the cowboy
who prefers whisky to wine; it takes many years
to understand what pain is. If you run out of room,
start piling them on top of the bookshelf until you hit
the ceiling–holy magnificent dance. The wedding is doomed,
we all know the incessant hiss—tinnitus. I saw smoke
issuing out the chimney; I’ll be reconciling with the meaning
of parenthood forever.
Humblers / Jane Elias
To be struck dumb
by the complex chord
of the late-night fridge-hum,
the stroke of the hallway clock
more caressing than you
remembered, the toilet’s
near listless hiss—
and the envelope
of improbable quiet
sealing you all in till dawn,
a cloistered chamber orchestra—
it’s a gift you didn’t ever think
to ask for. Or maybe you did,
once, and like so many ungranted
wishes it finally slipped your mind.
Come to find out
the witching tics
they build and build
the longer you listen,
the stronger your will
to stop meddling
in what you mistook
for dead air
with your crass palaver.
What relief,
what relief to not have
to speak, to hear
there is no void after all.
Bells / Alix Jason
Bells for raindrops
make the best christmas gifts
and even in summer
you can ring
if you don’t call
I have run out of floral shirts
for the season
which has lasted too long
anyway
The horns are on stage
and it is hot
too hot for the sand
and for meals
all songs sound like covers
when I’ve been standing too long
all bells ring
at the beginning of the season
Fade / Heather Katzoff
The face in the mirror
Names for My Bar / Jessica Kinnison
Sea Cave
Stone Street
May to December
Eye Patch
Vision Quest
Clawfoot Tub
More to Come
Next Time
Sojourn
Witness
Wimpy’s
Still Here
Evacuspot
Flood Street
Tootsie Roll’s
The Backache
Laundry Day
Your shoulder
Queer Wheel
Corner Pocket
The Safety Bar
5’Oclock Shadow
Cemetery
There’s Cake
Turning to the Tide / Jessica Letteney
The earth let me in on secrets.
Stories too big for words
tumble from rocks, half green, all blue,
belted bright, resting at the
edge of the Salish sea.
Tidepool water,
ruffled at the barnacles,
is satin quicksilver in the middle.
A pulse, perhaps
from the turnstones
foraging at the water’s edge.
There it is. And there again,
a push, not yet enough
to wet the tip of the sea star.
A swell at a cluster
of mussels long laid bare
in the summer tide of light.
A crab scurrying into a crevice.
The continent turns into the belly
of the waiting ocean.
I measure change
in grains of wetted sand.
A surge splashes the
driftwood on which I lie.
Time to heed the tide
and seek higher ground.
Soon enough, this bowl will be
filled, the only beyond
the opposite rim.
But for now, I kneel
as trees bend under western rays,
witness the daily miracles,
and cup the salt of communion.
Hunting the Beach / P.F. Potvin
I spied the prehistoric
Petoskey
rugose coral
peaking from a stone
pile of grays and stooped
to retrieve the six-sided
corallites like honeycombs
that once wriggled tentacles
from center mouths
pulling prey
into the polyp when
a shot made me
spin and three deer
blasted from the bushes
their hooves clawing
sandy clods down the beach
and even after they leapt
back into the brush
you could still smell
earth and rain
in their hair
Asking the Artificial Intelligence to Paint Its Impression of the Stars / Jenny Stohlman
do not dream
this is the day
we come to know
that technology made us
so sensitive
we can hear the first movement of time
g wave stands for the goddess
undulations of her uterus still humming
from the corpses of her little stars
to me a starling is seasonal
passing southbound
then north like a clock
movement is time
and always has been
under the rainbow
in a $500 pair of headphones
work just mailed to you
as a little treat
cool sound of Allison Russel
begging for the joyful motherfuckers
in two tongues
three if you count the music
she doesn’t know if it’s too late
sun through the skylights
on your rescue pup’s gleaming coat
four laptops
two tablets
a phone
a projector
a two storey home
it takes fifteen years
and all your telescopes to hear
a pulsar repeating the universe’s first word
spacetime warping
through the midst of reality
the radio waves
your headphones
the first religious texts
old worshippers carving
reverberations into rock
it was always prickling the back of our necks
but we couldn’t see it
first, there was only the goddess
and then
like the rest of us
she started to sing
of labor
Timrod Park / Hailey Williams
Each time I stop to write &
think the well is dry, I turn
my eyes towards something
greater & smaller than myself.
A pocketbook copy of The Iliad
filled with men falling & dying
like tall poplars, their helmets
bounding off the dry, war-jangled
earth like beans being threshed.
Or a span of moss untrammeled
on the trafficked pathway, spores
still scrying out for purchase.
I find myself leaving books
in a lending library in the park
& consider that each living
spore, each swing or fountain,
nest or batch of algae has been
justified by one man to another.
Here the sun falls on canopies,
creek minnows, small faces,
& elsewhere are complexes
filled with air conditioners
& water cooler small talk.
In one of those, someone
asked for this little park.
Someone put their back
into it. Many someones,
rallying together without
the aid of Zeus or Athena.
I don’t know what holiness is,
if not words here in my hands
& land alive under my feet &
echoes — echoes
of those who spared them.
Day 29 / Poem 29
Revised Protocol of the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942* / Jane Elias
Secret
final solution of the Jewish question
The meeting opened
practical
handling
most important :
Forcing the Jews out
Forcing the Jews out
cleanse the living space of Jews
To prevent
wealthy Jews Jews without means
As far as the numbers
difficulties
Jews
Jews
eventually remain suitable
become
important
a matter of principle merits
Here it must be decided
In conclusion,
I wrote these down to tell you later / Alix Jason
-
Bells like roller skates
-
Rainmakers and harmonicas far from home
-
Abbreviations that never find their rhythm
-
Why did you have me mail that letter ?
-
I dreamt of a haunted arctic on the hottest day yet
-
Referring to Chevrolets as Chevys must be a marketing tactic and therefore I disapprove
-
Listening to an album on repeat is the type of low hum that dulls my emotions for now and intensifies them later can we ever just live in the middle ?
-
I’m not sure what ‘bells like roller skates’ means I wrote it down hoping you could explain
-
The beach will never be tacky just windy with jokes about how it all turns to dust
-
Salt salt salt, now now now, never better
Bloom / Heather Katzoff
The lilies needed coaxing this year
Letter to A Young Poet / Jessica Kinnison
Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk
Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk (Moonmilk) Moon-
milk
Go deep into the cave. Set your fingers to the wall,
cold and soft to the touch, and pull them along together
to make three lines. If you’re flea-bitten, kick your legs.
If the bats flock for your head, scream. If you lose your fingernails
in the dark, touch your face.
Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk
Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk
Press your belly. Impress your belly. Climb a ladder
to pull your fingers along the ceiling those flutings run
a better chance of lasting until someone comes
to study life on earth.
Moonmilk Moonmilk – (mooning)- Moonmilk Moonmilk
Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk Moonmilk
with the distance between
a modern person’s three middle fingers
the canvas is as big and small as that
of the whole world and its empires of
meanders macaroni serpentines
bison hands outlines of faces
intersections
overlap
lapse
Moonmilk (Moon)
in my bag / Jessica Letteney
a scrap with lines for poetry
receipt for vinegar and paper
owl feather
toothpick
orange aspirin
silver bear claw
for protection,
switchblade
for the same reason
I face the day,
ready for writing,
ready for my stalker,
ready for anything
COMFORT / Khaya Osborne
adorned by disaster, we sought
steam & expiration under rhythms
contrived by dangers lavish as hope.
when this is all over, please leave me
the bottles you tongued as we talked.
in my dreams, they are my kin. isn’t it so
desperate; pretending we haven’t mapped
each others’ hands, gauged new understandings
of extravagance by scanning each other’s lips? i cry
when i think of you; laughter is a cardiac event
characterized by spasmodic vocal vibration. do i have
enough heart for sharing? how still are your fingers
when you catch a firefly? does the light leave your possession
all in one piece?
Big Bay Point / P.F. Potvin
they
crammed
the room in WWII
with machines
to catch signals
high off the bluff’s
back, practice turret
gunning and warn
of incoming attacks, on
the morning we woke
in the room now named
Keeper Bergan spatting
about how best to spend
our morning as a storm
splashed and puffed
windows, the brightest
light on Lake Superior, sharp enough
to beam 20 nautical miles, couldn’t
pierce the ghost of first keeper William Prior
after his son died of gangrene from a sliced
shin and the father hung himself nearby from a tree
Leagues / Jenny Stohlman
They said hold your breath until the flags
Quickly became hold your breath until the halfway mark
Suddenly hold your breath to the end of the pool
Now I hold my breath and go for two laps
I like the feeling of panic
When my diaphragm is pulling and
Pulling and pulling until a vacuum opens
A black hole in my chest
And I am the source of the tides in this sea
They never tell you that you can be Poseidon when you grow up
The echo of my voice on a recording
Taken on someone’s beer-sticky laptop
The second to last poem from the second to
Last reader at the second to last reading
The sound quality’s for shit after all these years
But I feel proud to have made it to the end of
This pool of beautiful and arrogant noise
I want to lay the sound over a video of a free diver
In the moment they get so deep
That the weight of the water
Depletes the physics of buoyancy
Their skin and fat and lungs a dense anchor
The free dive transmuted to a free fall
What does it feel like when the water gets its leverage
If you black out hard, will you wake on the sandy floor
Thinking, “Damn, I drank too much poetry,”
Before your realize your feet aren’t even in the room?
The tales of mermaids sound like histories with salt in your ears
And once you’ve repeated this to yourself enough times
It’s going to be true:
Don’t you worry, now
We can make our last breath stretch all the way down to the end of the universe
Flyers / Hailey Williams
Us with our bundles,
our upturned faces,
elbows and minutia.
What little we take along,
each one of us. Swimming,
thrown together for a long,
unlong, blip of time.
I’d forgotten New York’s
coast line. Hello, odd beach.
Islands which once were not
islands. Punctuations of lightning.
Sweep of blue fingerprints,
the Atlantic. Ships anchored
above the fog line, perched
in the sky. From this angle,
plummeting over an edge.
Day 28 / Poem 28
Overrated / Jane Elias
The hoopla over human beings
seems, to me, overkill
most of the time.
What do you think?
Is your morning station
hyperbolic like mine?
Or does the news you tune into
lay it out flat,
refuse to fatten
the fact of our frailty
while too many children
claw at the dusty gate?
No one is waiting for us
to step it up,
so what’s the incentive?
I tell you:
I’m really asking.
How many more disasters
does it take,
how many polished films
of villainies,
how many of anything
before we go
Hitch Hikin’ / Alix Jason
Gone is the cowboy who prefers whisky to wine
or the occasional brandy when the weather is cool
sped off so quickly,
kicking up a trail of olive blossom dust
and enough cardamom to keep you sneezing
through the night
Tore off with your wastebasket boots
and all that you could fit between the hips of your horse
and the pockets of your heart
a handkerchief made of stars to wipe your brow
and catch your tears
a husk filled with sweet corn stuck in your holster
where your pistol should be, for nourishment is
the best defense
and the best peace offering you could give
The sun beats down your back
and bakes your skin to orange peels
to reveal your tangerine flesh
will your citrus dry out in the desert ?
or will you always manage to pull a candlestick from your boot when you need light ?
I watched you ride off
and saw the two silver armed angel’s on the back of your boots,
spurs,
but you only use them to open wine.
Dictionary Home / Heather Katzoff
Build me a house
with your words
all the best ones
the ones we memorized
sourcing their etymology
for standardized tests
before letting them creep under our bibliophile skin
to become part of our anatomy
bones, really
timbers with a particular tonality
scaffolding our ideas
about each other
in multi-syllabic ecstasy
each room laid out
in our idiosyncratic syntax
with adjectives and adverbs as our decor
author this fork-tongued fantasy with me
let me live in your words
bathing in their sound as you
speak those words
back to me
the silvery timbre of your voice
echoing through the halls of our dictionary home
Despair More, Fantastic You / Jessica Kinnison
faith is not a work of art
my back of the head existence
in our tight-rope world
what would I die for
how do I switch my face
to my face—a hatrack
manifests as a person
sloped shoulders, in the dark
why would Truth be hanging
there, tall as a person
if I wasn’t meant to look
and before long, the hatrack lives
in me and I stand in the dark
scaring myself over in the bed
causing the back of my head to pretend
nothing’s there but a long night’s sleep
how to be completely human, to graft
my trusting limbs to a rubber tent
bound to collapse and leak forever
how to rest when longing
to muster up a cause to fight
for one’s self we are taught
to do it alone, on a great odyssey,
sleighing dragons and drowning
like paying down debt in secret
it just gets deeper, the misrelation
of despair to despair
to become fantastic is a hazard
to rest squarely on despair and say so
instead of merging to the temporal job
of living all I know is that I am the reason
nothing matters to me — the tent can stand
Love lives in the ground
Sagebrush Sea / Jessica Letteney
San Bernardino October motel
black garbage bag in the pool,
grass like tinder,
bumper cars, Tilt a Whirl.
With my new rescue dog,
heading north from Hesperia,
I turn west 10 miles through layers:
crushed diatoms, folded sediments,
once-submerged, now they limn the ascent.
On a small road through piñyons and sand,
I turn wrong to silence,
barbed wire, and a ruddy sign:
Sequoia National Forest—Domeview Wilderness.
A man with a mastiff appears,
“No one knows this is here,”
and I tell him how lost I am at 9,000 feet.
He turns me toward Kennedy Meadows,
its sagebrush sea.
I park under two pines,
walk with the dog through the riot of willows,
pick chips of obsidian from alluvium.
She listens for water; I hear the wind.
After hot ramen and shrugged-on fleece,
I sit with a pen but cannot look down.
I am surrounded by flowers, full yellow.
Neon pastels, a Renoir dress on a summer day.
The still-hot sun quickens their bitter odor,
the moon a blade in the eastern sky.
My head nods.
In my chair I dreamt I sailed on a sea of sage.
SUNSHINE / Khaya Osborne
ingratitude is wealth’s largest
indicator, a neonate yellow’s
privilege bask. i swallowed smoke
today & called it living. all the men
i could love or have loved held only
bequeathed power, none they yanked
by root from a living scalp or yielding
soil. there are gasoline-fed machines pillaging
coal from the earth. can you blame an essentia
for facilitating its own depletion? a symbiosis
is only so when both subjects survive. i was objectively
most beautiful when i most wanted to die. i spoke louder,
took fuller bites, wore more colors so as not to be forgotten.
now i wear white, pray more, pick my battles for those i already
love. isn’t it fascinating how a bell tolls every hour on the hour,
but for so many minutes, it rests–silent & still? romance is a waste;
aren’t you tired of offering warmth to those feasting on their own
destruction?
Words for a Mother / P.F. Potvin
In her nightmare the moon
fell & she rose to warn
her father but his chair
sat cold in the radio’s
hum
she switched it
off
tiptoed through the dining
kitchen living & out
the back screen to the orchard
where her father’s hand
shushed along the gray
mare’s back & muzzle
as he lowered
his head closed his
eyes & whispered
into her ear
It didn’t take much growing up / Jenny Stohlman
To hear not quite so
Big, not quite so
Strong, not quite so
Tall, not quite so
Not quite so much
You’ve snowballed
Into something just
A bit more than woman
Do you really need all
That flesh, let us take
A pound or two, ten
It’s not meant to
Be a part of you
You’d feel so much better
Without so much body
Any part you can grab onto
You’re going to need to let go
They didn’t like it when I did
Name Day / Hailey Williams
I want to marry you in the land between
our childhoods, beside a spring, upon
the death of this long summer.
I want a wind chime of lost keys.
I want to wear loose linen.
I want to drink from mismatched vessels
around unexpected bonfires.
I want the ring you fashioned from a metal
coupling, threads smoothed away.
I want to give you a ring imprinted
with our newly invented family crest.
I’ll wear your name in private, in silence,
in bed, in your arms. I’ll wear it at each
birth, each sickness, each death. I’ll write
under my own, the part of me which looks
in on this life from afar, the young one,
the lone one, the one still lost in clouds,
at sea, in grief, in the moment. We all
carry this distance from one instant
to the next. In this instant, I write
selfishly, with a self-given name,
with my small vices and fears, to give
away to strangers with stranger names.
I want you in my poems as one name,
in our life as another. I want your freedom,
I want your limitless, limb-longer vision.
I want to stretch in your hands like steel,
like a bow — with intention, with strength.
Day 27 / Poem 27
Walking Home / Jane Elias
Dream Baby Dream / Alix Jason
when you have no more spells to cast you live on fumes alone and fumes with wine parings to take the edge off aging and losing the ability to create more nostalgia. once you have seen one motel you’ve seen them all and no matter how many times you wake up you will check your pockets for loose change and find fumes alone and in pairs nestled in the dirty crevices that no cleaning will ever get to. no church mouse has seen the inside of every motel and aging always looks better on someone named Frankie, regardless of fumes. no baby looks better than Frankie .
List High / Heather Katzoff
Mississippi Delta People: A Love Story / Jessica Kinnison
phyllo dough and Lebanese folk songs
church wax and thin sugarcanes for a double flute
pacifists and Martin Luther King, Jr.
open flat land and a need for solitude
comfort day for the Chows of Clarksdale
trying to remember their Chinese mothers’ recipes
something like the blues Lebanese parents would sing
sad songs, old people remembering the old country
Mennonite activism and quietism
anabaptists and the best sandwich bread
not black and not white
that by itself gives you some isolation
egalitarianism, nonconformity, separation,
as many as 50 Chinese grocery stores in Greenwood
beef with cauliflower whole fish garnished with fresh ginger
fire under a garage wok and Roast pork with honey-hoisin glaze
at the crossroads known the world over, you can get pork tips
and, for those in the know, grape leaves.
Yellow / Jessica Letteney
–After Gillian Clarke
An Alamance County morning.
Before green, before bees,
while we’re still in bed,
you say, “I can barely breathe.”
Tufts of yellow Lab fur
stir in the corners.
Shadows of
the first leaves,
outside the window.
I wrap us in the harmless,
quilt your mother made
when you were ten.
The yarn she tied
in lemony bows
unraveled.
.
I curve my hands around your
belly—“Don’t,” you say—
inhale the ochre odor of your ear—
“that tickles,” you say.
The timbers creak when you get up.
The dog burrows under the quilt.
From my pillow,
a butter stripe of sun,
the alkaline of cooking whites.
I fold the laundry,
stagger to the kitchen with
two piles of sunflower towels.
You have set out our plates,
your face washed in shadow,
your hands filled with gold.
So this is how yellow feels.
NEGRO PASTORAL / Khaya Osborne
the deer’s antlers are cocked toward the tree
stump, grass rich as blood hanging from their
ends. we pray to the copper hills, sovereign colonies
of fat, generous bees sharing merciful, promising pollen.
the only threats be the ones we make. the only ropes be
lilac & lavender stems woven into our hair. the hunter’s
pot never cowers cold. we own heat, all embraces borne
by orange yearning. we kiss at coral dawn, pink dusk,
all arresting hours in-between. who knew love brought
jumprope & jill scott to the function? who knew love
kills what won’t set you free? superpredators we are,
cuddling on a familiar mattress, a spoon & fork pressed
under its burden. we play at divination, coax hope’s
coffers to yield more from the earth. this is repair.
my children know safety. my children eat daily.
if one of them cry, they lift their arms to a cerulean
chiffon sky & they always find me, smiling, ready.
Shenanigans / P.F. Potvin
on the same oak
bench I sat as a kid
kickwrestling my elder
sister under the table
until dad shot us
the look
you slid dominos
d
o
w
n l i k e s u r f e r s
b a r r e l i n g
t u b e s
across the kitchen
your sister at the end
too infant to walk
but standing in totters
tittering each time
one bumped her knuckles
and you cried “ow”
All Creatures Must Eat / Jenny Stohlman
Mother instructs child to raise a knife
Draw it across the neck
Insert it below the sternum
Run it below the membrane
This is where your lungs live, too, baby
And when you were the moon of my belly
You kicked in the water beneath my ribs
Until I gasped every night
Your feet drowning me from the inside
This elk cow was a mother once or twice
Fairy fingers gripped her babies’ hooves
Keeping her abdomen intact from their slicing toes
A slaughter is defensible
We see calves and feel no apetite
Until a fire cleanses
We thrive
On processed animals
Mother gets a doe tag every year
She has little use for more antlers
And the meat tastes better
When it has given her a further hunt
Squinting through the camouflage of wood
Temple of Aphaia / Hailey Williams
We are prehensile skeletons.
Imagine this: a Minoan cult
builds an open air temple
in 1300 BC to pray for harvest
from the fertility goddess Aphaia.
Four times the site is destroyed,
pillaged, rebuilt greater than before
one on top of the other. Take my
bones, for instance. How many
times could they be animated,
studied, painted, crafted into flutes?
At this moment I am standing
on the bones of 500 BC. Beneath
lies at least one other temple
untouched for fear of collapse.
Two guesses at what’s down there:
ancient dildos, evidence of aliens?
I know what it is to see the outline
of a mystery and weigh the cost
of knowledge with destruction.
For instance, where will I go
when I leave these bones behind?
Day 26 / Poem 26
Moving On / Jane Elias
nothing to do with
getting things done
simply one by one
to an ungodly sum
the earthful of dirty work
both Wordle-urgent
& dead
on the end
table with the
unread mail
say failure
but render
utter a prayer
please
sleep
leaves
peace
Queen of the Supermarket / Alix Jason
I missed the devil
who lived in the freeze aisle
because I only saw the beauty on the shelves
of bottles
boxes
and canned etceteras and obscurities
expiration dates are just a suggestion
of a worse outcome than this
there are no ice cubes here
I can see only liquids
and puddles of a melted list
the tiles make my joints ache
and we shuffle
from square to square
somehow missing the devil’s feet
how did I avoid this mess
the last time
my left pinky was in better shape
and I knew how to steer
unknown waters and slippery whatnots
slower and calmer and colder
than before
my teeth chatter and thaw
For my birthday / Heather Katzoff
all I wanted was a kiss
and not a peck on the cheek
chaste and friendly
and not a 2am club kiss
sloppy desperate
as people pair off
at the end of the night
I wanted a kiss
that slides into place
without work
that makes you aware
of the angle
of every hair follicle
and the sound
of breath and heartbeat
that makes every synapse
in your system
come alive with potential
energy
a kiss that hangs
in your memory
like a signpost
forever marking time
before and after
all I wanted was a kiss
from you
and you obliged
appearing at my bedside
in a veil of moonlight
and it was perfect
so perfect
it almost didn’t matter
when I woke up
Lightning Storm in Clarksdale / Jessica Kinnison
Last week I looked at my lover
And touched his reddened cheek
I took his thighs in my two fists
And no more did we weep
We moaned until the morning
We pulled out all the sheets
We slept sweating back to back
And went to dreaming in the deep
Listen up, you June time lovers
You dreamers and you schemers and you,
storm chasers, Good God A-mighty gonna
strike you down
The next day he came down coughing
And nothing could he eat
He sweated and he pained for hours
While fever reddened his cheek
After he fought his demons
And got up with the dew
We felt bigger than the spirit
And thought our troubles through
Listen up, you June time lovers
You dreamers and you schemers and you,
Storm chasers
As light came early that next morning
I woke up coughing and sweating too
My throat swollen nearly to a close
His fever marked my cheeks all through
Scarlet red and full of spite
I wept and thought my hours few
My cheeks gave away our delight
And tarnished our love so true
Good God A-mighty gonna
strike you down
And as we both recovered
A lightning storm came over from Arkansas
Shaking the house from window to cupboard
Leaving us in the dark to listen to the thrall
As the room got hotter and hotter
It got so hot it was against the law
The wind barreled in like a train motor
It was the most lightning we ever saw
Listen up, you June time lovers
You dreamers and you schemers and you,
storm chasers,
After while, our modesty could no longer hold
we stripped all the way down to nothing
and still wanted to find a way to be more bold
we’d have taken off our hair if not for the cutting
Naked again as we were done before
I couldn’t see anything in that melodious dark
Meanwhile, you said you could see all four
of our legs so lightning white and so stark
Good God A-mighty gonna
strike you down
I closed my eyes and pretended I was in Sweden
In winter with snow all around
Not almost July in the Mississippi Delta
With no electricity in this town
What shaky ground is modesty
Sweating all night in false pajamas
In the dark nothing counts as honesty
In the dark everything counts as honesty
If this were another kind of tale
We’d be lying so long, so pale, so fair
dead from tuberculosis or poison or sour ale
Instead, we’re still here, a worn but living pair.
Spiral Body / Jessica Letteney
How does one move in a spiral body?
Where hips cant east and ribs twist west?
Dancing, walking—earthbound moves are shoddy.
Scoliosis diagnosis—my ligaments and tendons are stressed.
Any step may be a tumble of crossing tarsals.
Balance demands my attention and care.
I lift at the gym to hone the muscles I marshal,
Yet any action may seem drunk, impaired.
In the pool is where I move with ease.
Slip off the edge and enter as salmon, otter, manatee.
Cup and pull, breathe to one side, reverse, reprise.
Joyful lifelong swimmer, I flip and turn balletically.
I don’t care if, when I walk on land, my body goes awry.
In my liquid lap lane, I’m a bird, I soar, I fly.
VICTORY / Khaya Osborne
let’s drink our pain into children;
soft dusks & dawn glass, wavering.
if we love each other for real, it shines
in the bed puddles & coffee stain infestations,
the dirt ring pirouette of a bathtub’s scrubbing.
hold me in today’s light, no longer sepia dreams.
your skin on me is the prize, everything else a consolation.
As a Day Is / P.F. Potvin
right after driving all night through storms
right after running a mountain marathon
right after signing the lawyer’s papers
right after leaping from the rope
right after swimming across the river
right after drying around a fire
right after setting the picture straight
right after drinking from the cup
right after brushing all her nails
right after zipping up the tent
right after pinching both her thighs
right after spreading the bag
right after covering her eyes
she tried
Homecoming / Hailey Williams
This spring, a bird built a nest
in our dried hanging fern.
Today as she bowed over
four bobbing heads, the sun
loosened itself from a brooding
steel sky & I was lulled to peace
by the voice of my beloved.
His head folded over a leather
copy of my favorite book,
light glancing over his beard,
copper & gold & obsidian.
He is every man I’ve known
& someone new each day.
I wait to read him under
the next sun & the next spring.
At some distant point, each
thread or twig or fiber
of our days-to-day will be
woven into unassailable truths:
his cool hand on the back
of my neck, pages lined with
wildflowers from our travels,
something born & raised
by us or in us every morning.
Day 25 / Poem 25
Game Night Pantoum / Jane Elias
at the top of the Taboo card.
I’m not allowed to say Jew, camp, oven, Nazi, Holocaust.
Those are the rules.
is the word that scores me a point if I get you to say it.
Those are the rules,
and if I say one of the taboo words, I lose a point.
is not Belsen, Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka,
and if I say one of the taboo words, I lose a point,
so yes, this game is kind of hard.
Not Mauthausen, Majdanek, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno.
Yes, this game is kind of hard
when there are so many words the answer isn’t.
Not #neveragain, Shoah, forget, six, million, remember, museum.
When there are so many words, the answer isn’t
at all easy to name, and the answer isn’t even a name.
Sonderkommando, Einsatzgruppen, Zyklon B, Hitler, Höss, Goebbels—
All easy to name, but the answer isn’t even a name, I said.
The only clues I give are Allegra, Calev, Lena, Moshe, Vital, Selly, Dad.
I’m not allowed to say Jew, camp, oven, Nazi, Holocaust.
The only clues I give are Allegra, Calev, Lena, Moshe, Vital, Selly, Dad.
It’s my turn again to make you say the word.
Meadowlands Complex American Dream Reprise / Alix Jason
In 5th grade I had to memorize how cranberry bogs are harvested and in 3rd grade I had to fill in a blank map of New Jersey with all its 21 counties and it wasn’t until my 20’s when I moved to the southern swamps, that I learned we had swamps back home not just malls and other places to get stuck
swamp
noun
1: a wetland often partially or intermittently covered with water
especially : one dominated by woody vegetation
2 : a tract of swamp
3 : a difficult or troublesome situation or subject
Flow / Heather Katzoff
in a free association fantasy
Serious Lightning / Jessica Kinnison
What quiet
from her sick bed breaks
Where on the air is written
a silent electricity between two lovers –
Ground and Sky,
It launches the woman from her bed
into a column of light
and reaches a crooked arm to heaven
and spreads over the surface of the ocean
only to disappear again
like a body she can’t see inside of
but knows as surely as her own skin.
Spell of the Strange Monsters / Jessica Letteney
Incant the syllables of this spell,
unfurl your heart in verse.
Wrap yourselves in the cold of the lake
and write. Fly with the bats under clouds
and catch the motes of night.
Touch pencil to paper and
write about river and wave,
loud in the tide and a lullaby later
that leads us into dreams.
We feed each other when we
bend over notebooks, begin
to write and read. Your words
float as feathers, her truth cupped
in an acorn cap, and hers clothed in a cape of stars.
Thank you, strange monsters
for casting your spells, for mapping a sand dollar,
for swimming, for your scalpel, for a sisterhood
of poetry, of the forest, the ocean of words.
ROMANTIC OBSESSION / Khaya Osborne
i’m not sure you can be addicted to what God keeps yanking
away. i consider the cockroach. how rot is his victory, the home
in which he spawns progeny. diabetes, heart disease, hypertension,
addiction—all the jupiterian ailments haunt my bloodline. indicators
of overindulgence. when a man fucks me good, he never wants to kiss
during or cuddle after. the last man who did had a baby with someone
else; i fled across the country & the heartbreak followed. am i going to be
a crazy bitch forever? do i have to give up on marriage to heal?
Caldera / P.F. Potvin
this morning I tossed your green
raincoat stuffed in a trash
bag the kind
in the photo
your cap
squashed
Yoda ears
stare locked on a cloud
alien or
alien cloud
as steam fizzed
crimson
vents in the caldera
we mused
about naming
your sister Pele
a few years following
I returned with a new
partner you said
you remembered
fish and turtles but not
the thousands of earthquakes
shivering.
tears from our bones
while we slept
Hartsfield-Jackson Airport / Hailey Williams
I took my suitcase to the suitcase park.
We took a long walk, observed other
suitcases whose owners matched them,
or didn’t. Handled them closely or let them
laze under a million fluorescent clouds.
We always enjoy the 2 hour rope course
& suitcase anatomy lesson. Thankfully
the suitcase doctors caught & removed
an overgrown toothpaste tumor
just in time. Now, we rest between
concourses, my head on its tummy,
a tender exchange amidst many
angry people in uncomfortable shoes.
Soon we will return home. I will
free us both of our burdens. I will
embrace my loved ones, tell stories,
recall the little presents carried
over oceans, give openly. My cat
will pad around inside my dented,
wobbly-wheeled companion, asking
questions with her soft, circling nose.
Likely they will hibernate together
in the darkest corner of my closet,
grateful — as I am — for the quiet.
Day 24 / Poem 24
Still Life / Jane Elias
she is both proud and ashamed
healthy relationships is on sale
says no one in particular as she stands there
Summer clothes / Alix Jason
If you aren’t wearing a muscle tank when you are moving a mattress
you are doing it wrong
It is considered unripe to wear something without holes
in the summer
If you have no scrapes and bruises on your knees
did you even ?
It is too slippery out to wear dresses
unless you have a signed permission slip
If no stain appears after four hours of wear
you may move 3 spaces to the right
It is the golden hour for an oversize t-shirt
you may hold the buttons
Remember / Heather Katzoff
pluck me
Mississippi Welcome Center / Jessica Kinnison
- Do you know if the streets up in the Delta are flooded?
I’m not gone lie to you baby; I sure don’t.
- Do you know what I just saw?
What’d you see?
- A man mooning the whole highway.
Oh, no. He did not. He did not!
- He did. His shorts were down around his ankles.
Ain’t that a crying shame. Pitiful. Just pitiful.
- Do you know red-winged black birds?
Yes, they look like they was painted that way.
- I’ve seen two today.
You must be doing something right, honey. Sure
must be. I’ve gone years without seeing not a one.
- If you don’t mind me asking, ma’am, do you get the weary blues every day?
Not sure I follow.
- Do you ever throw your Stetson in the dirt and beg the sky for mercy?
Are you feeling alright?
- Do you ever want to haul up and wail, catch the next train, and runaway?
I don’t want to lie to you, baby; I sure don’t. That bad sign,
it’s just out here blinking.
One of Them / Jessica Letteney
Birds were flying at me in my dream.
Wings outspread,
covering clouds and sky.
Their tips brushed my hair
sparking longing. “Let go,” they said,
“leave the earth.”
And I said yes.
Crows combed my thoughts,
doves traded velvet love,
swifts sang in the dusk.
But mostly I dreamt of raptors:
an eagle lofting, scattering crows,
pulling apart a pink and red heart.
I dreamt of a kestrel
orange dart in a hot sky,
map of a meadow below.
The grass moved and he drowned
in descent, a blade until
claws sank into flesh,
a mouse now meat.
I dreamt last night of birds,
holding me with wings,
carrying me with claws,
pulling me into a messy nest,
to feed me carrion.
I dreamt I was one of them.
CUDDLING / Khaya Osborne
many years before i met violence
on another’s terms, i killed a small
rout of snails living snuggly under
an intricately carved backyard red
brick. my aunt had bought me
a microscope kit. i needed to know
what’s inside of things; flowers,
mattresses, books, small soundless
creatures. it takes many years
to understand what pain is; how
a sogged teddy bear on a rain-warped
desk wrapped in a bloody blanket
can leave one desiccated. there’s a tattoo
on my right wrist no one notices, indignant
ungrateful hair patches right below it. i have
only screamed in agony–pleasure,
rage, shock; those are all too delicate
for the full throat. i never mean harm; did you know
touch is only one of six senses?
Through the Waves / P.F. Potvin
today searchers discovered
sub artifacts via robots
scanning the ocean
floor near the Titanic
while reporters posit
how & why
dodgy engineering or no
certification as perchance
culprits but who
can really know
the meaning of a weld
language of carbon or
the will of a cat springing
from a window onto
your lap while you recline
on a patio & sip
a second cappuccino reading
aloud to yourself
from your phone about another
set of small
microphone gods
always listening
through the waves
& here & there
giving sign
Biting Habit / Hailey Williams
With teeth I tell my cuticles
they do not belong. With blood
they ask why they still grow, then?
I tongue away their red protests.
I love you let me gnaw you.
Fingers betray each other,
peeling dry skin, prying
under ragged nails like jar lids.
It is this desire to be perfect,
to pick away the rough spots,
round out every edge, which
takes me further from perfect.
My hands are the most honest
part of me. When I am silenced
in that innermost way, I inspect
them closely. They will always
tell me, in their slow-healing way,
to forgive myself — or get a grip.
Day 23 / Poem 23
Ode to My Moka Pot: 1 / Jane Elias
Silver soldier,
you sit on the range
like a patient lover
cooling through the night
while I thrash awake
when I screamed
for a kind of help
the piano,
a little guitar.
this stirrer, this helpless-
without-a-flame flame, how
each morning
and I give it,
happily.
Cast a spell to ward off lice, bedbugs, and other itches / Alix Jason
Gather all the empty shampoo bottles you can find. If you need to, bring trash bags to salons and rummage through your neighbors bins. Sheepishly ask drug stores if they have any damaged goods they can’t sell. You need a lot of bottles. If you must, dump out full bottles into a large pot and start simmering the mixture…you will use this later. When will you know you have enough ? When your nose and throat are numb from the perfumes…then you are getting close. When your eyes water from parabens, even though all the bottles say they are free of such chemicals…you have other pests to worry about.
Throw all of the books off your shelves and out the door. Bugs love books and you need room for your bottles. Display the empty shampoo bottles on your bookshelf, order doesn’t matter, lice are colorblind and bed bugs can only sense movement, so aesthetics are a side note and a lofty wish if you so choose. But choose wisely, a misplaced L’oreal could fuck it all up. If you run out of room, start piling them on top of the bookshelf until you hit the ceiling. Throw some on your bed while you’re at it, they’re mostly empty and even if they leak, you need those poisons to deter the bed bugs. If you run out of room still, create a line of bottles going from the bookshelf all the way to the front door. Rinse and repeat.
Ink Therapy / Heather Katzoff
slip past my epidermis
strike the second layer of skin
punch pigment into patterns
of our own design
my body is your canvas
use it to create art from my stories
help me wrestle my demons
into submission
help me claim space
for my achievements
help me tell my tales
on my skin
they are there for all
to learn from
if you know the language
Moon Guitar / Jessica Kinnison
The one-eyed cat / she’s scared / starts running.
Why do poems start here / an intervention / a troubled spark.
Happy? No. / Want to change things? No. / That’s the moon guitar/
stubborn as a bull. / So what. / Moon guitar / put me in / play
the Allman Brothers again / I ain’t scared maybe / life can be shiny/
as shiny as Gregg Allman’s hair / was shiny / is shining
on the VHS tape from 1981 / Come and Go Blues/
got the come and go blues / gonna come then go/
gonna clock you with one eye/ shiver/ then run
shining / as is / as in
a spark.
Grant Graduation 1996 / Jessica Letteney
In new-mown grass I smell wet hope
and summer. Five boys race
pant legs flapping,
I envy their wild honk and bleat.
Mothers clutch a yellow page
lined with names, later to
place in a box or press in a book.
The chrome cast of crone’s cane,
she is helped by a red-haired girl.
A man holds a baby, heavy as a bag of peaches.
He holds her so.
I flick my elbow,
launch a ball for my dog.
Muted thunder of billowing taffeta gowns,
the sun paints orange folds on robes.
My Labrador runs the line of graduating seniors,
disrupting pomp and circumstance.
While families in love cheer them on.
DEMIURGE / Khaya Osborne
kiss my fingers
play me guitar
harm my mouth
bite my books
push into me
drink my wine
holy magnificent dance
you hold me
caress the child
toes meet leaves
make me honest
i want us
did you know that i can see the future?
On Its Own / P.F. Potvin
From their vantage the crows could see his ears burning. They circled in the name
of the father, son, and mother ghost who still managed to glide with feathers gapped
on the wing like broken teeth over the peach tree he planted when he first
settled in, soil too sandy, he dug the hole wider, filled the surround with kitchen
compost comprised mostly of banana peels, egg shells, scraps of lettuce, moldy
bean supreme until the tree stood on its own, bearing fruit the following
year, but when squirrels and birds struck, he netted the tree in a white
bonnet, waking one dawn to a shadow tangled in the branches, he tossed
the entire fabric to the wind, watched it float over the house, eclipsing
the sun, then strode to the shed for his axe.
Traveller’s Guilt / Hailey Williams
The Sun Also Rises left out
the part about travel where
you experience meaninglessness
in the midst of all the greats —
love, history, patriotism, knowledge.
Here you are, surrounded
by that unending stream
of human survival (here
Aristotle’s lecture hall, there
the seat of early democracy)
and all you have is the ouzo
in your hand and the love
of your life back home
in the midst of the daily grind.
His bosses are dismissive,
his lunch comes from a vending
machine, he’s holding anxiety
by the shoulder like an old
friend he can barely stand
meeting again and again.
What is it really, to order
a stronger coffee in one
time zone compared
to another? How about
the sun sets in the same
colors every night? He is
alone tonight like I am.
He is learning one thing
about life and I am learning
another. Soon I will find
him a bit changed and
wonder if he sees that
change in me. We will
make our usual coffee
in the morning, and our
lips will touch just the same
before a long, strange day.
Day 22 / Poem 22
Take It from Me/ Jane Elias
Dust Devils / Alix Jason
I don’t make the rules
I just read the books
The janitors will sweep your melted voices into the bin
and upcycle you into kitty litter, astroturf, and diatomaceous earth
I don’t make the rules
I just clean up around here
The same people who drive the mosquito spray trucks
will scatter you across intersections with the hope of slowing traffic
I don’t make the rules
I just drive the cars
When the dust settles and the roads are carless
your particles will bounce with the rotation of every tire you don’t see and every horn you don’t hear and every stop sign that isn’t tilted and every rat skittering to safety and every sting of the blazing hot pavement and every rumble of a stolen catalytic convertor and every pothole threatening to unravel your rubber and every sticky wrapper and every millimeter the windshield crack grows and every roach that just wants a kiss and every silence that you missed
I don’t make the rules
I just sing
Barbarella / Jessica Kinnison
any healthy country
he was the face
when you become somebody
like any health individual
of the America
you don’t need anybody
in perpetual revolution
people wanted to believe in
when you become somebody
I’d look in houses
and people would be sitting at the table
except when I looked into their eyes
there was a lot hidden
a science fiction story
or maybe I’m always real
actresses are quite dumb
I wanted to help him help me
become a human woman
I never felt real
half thorn
I am
never felt real
past / present / Jessica Letteney
fields near a river drowning from mountains
swollen with meltwater ebbing to wetlands
dams opened throats coursing the miles
willows clouded we shuck shoes
heron screeched dinosaur sound under toes
walk furrows warm soil
mosquito swarm pennyroyal mint
dogs tongues trailing over teeth
spiraled diamonds glittering in sun
drops hung hold worlds
prism exquisite
god me
LOCUS / Khaya Osborne
with most substances, one can evacuate
the atmosphere in which that substance
comprises the evening’s blood. unique
is flesh in this regard. one cannot shuck
their largest organ without dying; stroll
down broadway at noon with only nerves!
you’ll make a bitter liquor of yourself, sweet
only to the desperate–those who eat only what’s
offered onto candlelit tables, you’ll itch in places
you aren’t meant to see, yet. so how does one
overcome a craving for friction? a wet dance
in a blazing embrace so uncomfortable, you need
to call it yours? i don’t believe in hell, but i might
be wrong; there are so many beautiful things i can’t
touch.
Your Spiders Aren’t Normal / P.F. Potvin
you said with legs
freshly squeezed
into knee high socks
gossamer as a veil
then
spun and peered
into shadows behind
your knees dried
by professional
pricking go see
someone now you said
and traced space
where cobalt
rivers once darted
and I see myself
dashing along
the bank as swell
becomes slosh
blood pooling
my ankles not pressuring
enough to return
normal via vena cava
closing in on the gush
of a fall
calling your name
Last Day in Naxos / Hailey Williams
I bought a watercolor
of a sardine cut in half
from a Greek man who
told me to forget daily
the obstacles, instead
make joy. In exchange
for a set of silk garments
for my upcoming nuptials,
the designer asked me
to keep living beyond
four walls after I wed.
There is a way to do it all,
she told me, and children
will learn to live by living.
Later I shared a bus seat
with a woman on her way
to Hilko for the afternoon.
We each smelled of sweat,
each nodded off despite
rugged switchback views
of the Naxian hinterlands.
We nodded slightly upon
our parting. In Hilko I took
every turn that gave me
pause. Low on water,
dangerous thoughts
met me on the cobbles —
Why not go a little further?
Two lizards wrestled
their way off a rock wall
into my path and darted
apart, oddly self-conscious.
I found myself alone
in an aging olive grove,
where calloused trunks
bowed beneath Mount Zas.
Seven peaks or more tilted
their faces to the sun
and bid me do the same.
In this way I spotted one
weathered Byzantine church,
guarded only by a cascade
of fist-sized stones
which demanded all my
foot-eye coordination.
There I picked wildflowers
to press in my book.
Even the soil spoke to me
fondly of art and balance.