THE October, 2024 30/30 PROJECT PAGE

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 October are: David Burrows, Miriam Calleja, Cathy Ferrell, Dralandra Larkins, Clyde Long, Taylor Mallay, Cecille Marcato, Lizzy Polishan, Khamil Riley, and Gordon Taylor

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

Day 31 / Poem 31

LET US SPEAK DELICATELY[1] / A Cento composed by Gordon Taylor

crash! cymbals! flash![2]

the crowd goes wild[3]

my tongue purples[4]

restless legs only know run[5]

dust scampers into warrens[6]

I am hurricaned to sleep[7]

Where were you

when you had your first reckoning? [8]

every year I act surprised[9]

the breeze improvizes[10]

whispers something[11]

rain needles my head[12]

It smells like petrichor & everything is dripping[13]

dampened dirt weeps blood[14]

prayers that bring

a slight gleam[15]

calendar a grave reminder[16]

my name is not a lullabye[17]

the night is not a coat[18]

we are a quilted blanket[19]

[1] Cecille Marcato

[2] Cathy Farrell

[3] Miriam Calleja Shaw

[4] Gordon Taylor

[5] Khamil Riley

[6] Cathy Farrell

[7] Miriam Calleja Shaw

[8] Khamil Riley

[9] Taylor Mallay

[10] David Burrows

[11] Taylor Mallay

[12] Gordon Taylor

[13] Lizzy Polishan

[14] Clyde Long

[15] David Burrows

[16] Clyde Long

[17] Dralandra Larkins

[18] Lizzy Polishan

[19] Dralandra Larkins

Day 30 / Poem 30

untitled / David Burrows

to admit to liking

solitude

alone

with words

on a page

the companion

of a lyre

just beads

of silence

the stillness

after rain

Ars Poetica for when you don’t recognize yourself / Miriam Calleja

The computer is making sure it’s you
Your phone won’t unlock,
fingerprints scrubbed out from
self-soothing all night. You ask me
whether everybody else is having this life
whether it needs to be so hard.
I self-sabotage, own up to
the creation of my own anxiety.
The texts we choose
to consume, to translate,
are telling our dark tales.
There is a squeak in the wheel,
a pea under a pile of mattresses
a book that disrupts the wall.
Some of us live in two
languages, dreams, tongues,
thoughts split. Another year,
I will speak to you in Italian,
you say yes, yes let’s speak.
Let’s loosen our tongues and
our waistbands. Let’s stop
giving a shit. In one moment
I understand everything.
In the next, I rewrite the rules.

In the waiting, the day is loosened / Cathy Ferrell

In the waiting, the day is loosened
(with a line by Miriam Calleja Shaw)

You and that synthetic
floral arrangement are the only ones
in the room. Stare
just beyond. No one asks
where you’ve gone.

Think about
the month, conversations, food,
pictures sent and shared, language

we loosen tongues and waistbands.

you’ve gained
a few pounds
a few poems
a friend

You are unwound
part of
the sterile day made softer

Tuck one foot up,
swing the other,
wait to be called.

Truchas / Clyde Long

– to my mentors and friends from the
years at Tupelo Press Truchas

Tupelo’s Truchas paradise is hidden,
folded within Sangre de Cristo foothills.
Severe trout-less terrain inspired poetry
in frigid clear sunshine mornings and
sunset-painted happy hour evenings.
Milky Way’s deep dark starry nights
commanded our work for morning.

In the ruggedness and darkness
we were safe within poetry’s womb;
a put together community of many
senses and many minds. It was pure
kismet, and we wrote that way.
Thinking back to those times is a
fond memory, worth a poem or two.

Dictionary of No Crying / Cecille Marcato

Ahead in the count a batter attacks the strike zone, an aspirin tablet,
banjo hitter but BAM a Baltimore chop in a bandbox & runner on first.
Captain Hook wanting the catbird seat, not the cellar, jerks the pitcher after a can of corn;
daisy cutter after a dark one from a rookie on the mound, deuces wild, an
eephus pitch like El Duque’s ends in a bomb – extra innings, a trip to the
Fall Classic for the flamethrowers, Mr. Foot in the Bucket, all the figger filberts,
gap hitters, golfers, grand slammers, guess hitters & their GMs.
Humpback liner handcuffs the infielder who airmails the horsehide to the hapless
infielder on first just back from the IL but it ain’t over till it’s over, until a
judy or a jack or a jam jars loose the score or
knocks the cover off the ball after some
late-inning pressure & someone laces a liner to left field to load up the bases for the
masher up next hitting a meatball in the middle of the inning, a moonshot over the fence.
No room at the inn, no man’s land, no-hitter, no decision, no crying in baseball even for the
one-game wonder on the interstate.
Park a three-run homer, a piss missile, on the payoff pitch or have a
quality start or a quick win (that’s another story) & don’t let your
rabbit ears throw you when the fans razz
Swing batter, sah-wing or let the sabermetrics get you rattled.
Three true outcomes — that’s when the fat lady sings to the
upper decker Uecker seats. Fan interference unhinges the umps & the
visiting team supporters, who, outnumbered fear a
|walk-off but pray for a wallop, a walk-off, a whitewash, a win, some
X marks the spot)
yardwork. That’s what it’s all about, y’all,
zero, zero, zero – that perfect game.

Try asking the moon for grace. / Lizzy Polishan

The moon would have coughed
grace into your hands if she could have.
Her light, ropes of white, coiled
in her open mouth :: her mouth, a wound
singing :: a dithyramb designed to seduce
you. White light winds as snakes snaking
through your hands. You are bound
to this oak tree :: this oak tree a fretboard
:: a fretboard makes your body a string.
Does that make you a violin? A double
bass? Although you lack F-holes & Man
Ray is nowhere to be found. If you want them
in a painting, you must hold your body
still. Then you must soften into oil paint.
When the Protozoa squirm in the open
beam of your light, they accidentally freeze.
There is a punchline in there somewhere.
Maybe after the cop walks into the bar.
How could you put your hands up when
you are just a baby Protozoa? How could you
keep from falling in love? Falling in love with
Jenny Ortega? When that song loops in
your head? The night is a star. The night
collapses.
The night lives in your chest. Your heart keeps
you alive. The moon would have laid
an egg in this bird’s nest if she could have.
You would have had something
good to eat.

Better Days / Gordon Taylor

GTaylor-Better-Days

Day 29 / Poem 29

untitled / David Burrows

a thought unbidden spoke

Jesus loves me if you dont

Source
Universe

            loves
            me
            if you don’t

a medicine
a thought unbidden spoke

Jesus loves me if you don’t

to cool fever
break shame
wrap itself
like a green mossy blanket
around a body of sores
a junkyard of broken glass
battered doors
parts of windows
dead cars
desires never realized
and dreams
old toys

Let’s say… / Miriam Calleja

that for a change

You are the island

And I’m the deep sea

That will not allow you to stay alive

And let’s say I am the bear

You, the helpless tourist

Mauled with camera still rolling

And let’s say, for once,

That I’m the spectator

And that you’re born again

Again and again

Let’s do it that way this time.

small wonder / Cathy Ferrell

(a book title found poem)

wild
pomegranate heart–
come, tell me how you live.

I like you
undoll,
a charm of goldfinches
surprised by joy.

bird by bird,
women in sunlight
rewild
the lives of the heart.

wild
pomegranate heart–
blue rose,
small wonder.

(created with book titles by Cheryl Strayed, Miriam Calleja Shaw, Agatha Christie, Sandol Stoddard Warburg, Tanya Grae, Matt Sewell, C.S. Lewis, Anne Lamott, Frances Mayes, Meredith Stricker, Jane Hirshfield, Kait Quinn, and Barbara Kingsolver)

After Sonnet 29 / Clyde Long

When with intended ardor
          I suffer in this silent state,
complaining never to others
          only to me, bitter the taste —
if only I were a smiling sort,
          sincere, glad handing, bright
well-met, ever reaching out,
          perceptive, winner of night.
Yet most I think of you
          and only then I am alive
(Vivid like a flower’s bloom,
          new born) redeemed from care.
Your enduring love soothes me,
          always night’s brightest star.

Lady Lawyer Explains Gravity to the Men of the Jury on a Sacrocolpoperineopexy Malpractice Case / Cecille Marcato

Minus a uterus
the pelvic floor
is a rugose desert
waiting for the dry weather
of old age to collapse
the roof of its house.

It’s about gravity,
the lady lawyer
explains to the men
of the jury
who put their belongings
on the edge
of the jury box
not believing
that the pen
the pad
the coffee cup
full of coffee
will fall to earth.

On Earth
she tells them
everything falls to earth.

Cento with Questions / Lizzy Polishan

with lines from David Burrows, Miriam Calleja, Cathy Ferrell, Dralandra Larkins, Clyde Long, Taylor Mallay, Cecille Marcato, Lizzy Polishan, Khamil Riley, & Gordon Taylor

Are you a power, a message, a connection to source? Are you naturally so tall?
Be honest with yourself—are you smart?

Can a black cat, thrown out of the belfry, land on its feet?
Can the cluster of rotting cherries wearing the skin of flies in the silver wire mesh bowl effuse its own sweet flavor?…

…Culture got ya tongue?

Do you know what they do to women like you? Drugs? Do you see what I’m saying?
Edna, did it stick in your throat, too? And, in choking down sand, how will the sand dollars

Fare? If the chasing started when she was a cat continues and she is not a cat, is the chasing still
Going on? How long has it been? How do you feel? How close is lust to loss?

How many more bullets? How do people stand it? Have you ever watched a python eat itself?
Is it easier to forgive the dead? Is this your first time? Or is it

Just tinnitus? Or is it just getting old?
Keep it together—won’t you dissolve with me?

Live and let live, you know? When you say my name, can’t you taste
My mother’s blood? If I cross out the monster—depression—what happens?

Now what? Hear that beat?
Or is it just tinnitus? Or is it just getting old? How do you

Pronounce your name? Do you know who owns this hallway? Did you know that 1 and 3
Queer people want to die? Why have we pinned our lips?

Remember when you were the largest circle & I was the smallest matter?
So what if winter comes? Sing a new song, but keep the same melody?

Tell me, do you hear the bass? Too much bass in my name like the ngoma drum? Why did daddy
Use his fists to express his emotions? Because you’ve always been a paper

Valentine? We all have fears, right? Where were you when you had your first reckoning?
Where are my toes? What would you do if you could turn back?

What on earth is a finger lime? What wisdom does it hold? Could we
Xerox the moon? Does it hurt? Do you see that matrix of angels? How do

You descend into your body? How did you find each other? Our distances approached
Zero but our points never converged.

Great, Full / Gordon Taylor

(Toward a history of wasps)

not love

but love

ish.

Consider a single event changing a generation

rage

folding a mind into a fist.

Consider spider lilies

dark tenderness.

The wasp I crushed, orange tarsi

a memory

of eyes wide in a kitchen

lifted to table in dim light

from the lime green Viking stove

cards flashed

2+2, mama said. Everything sums. We earn our joy.

That afternoon I smashed a nest the wasps made of chewed dead

poplar. We were chased

from the cemetery. The slowest boys

were stung.

Mama said Gran gave the second bedroom to my uncle

because he was a boy. Mama slept on the living room sofa

for years

saving leftover white lace scraps in cardboard boxes

until my uncle left for university

until she sewed her own

wedding dress.

Consider Mama running for the Montreal streetcar

boarding just as the light turned green

just as dawn broke

she met Papa.

Consider a family’s soft

rejections.

Mama said I needed to be spared

from the queer

danger of dreams

and I should never confess

my difference.

Consider a dim light can also hurt

eyes. Silence, also a siren.

After the car accident that crushed Gran

Mama took her father in

packed my Star Wars x-wing

bought with a thousand pennies

into a box

moved me to the living room sofa.

Consider Mama arguing

with the cashier for the right

to pay with pennies.

Consider repetition.

The wasp I killed this morning

crushed, orange tarsi

in my pocket.

I reached in for my phone and the stiff stinger dug into my palm.

My hand numbed and swelled

twice its size by evening.

My heart exploded

from holding my breath

in dim light

from the lime green Viking stove

as cards flashed.

Day 28 / Poem 28

untitled / David Burrows

when the ship
hit the rocks
hull and body
opened up
smashed
when insanity
lightning
slapped
it was him
a dog
that came running
panting
licking me
with a big tongue
lifting me to soar unbridled
into the mountains
invoking the psalms

Found poetry, medical appointments / Miriam Calleja

If this is a medical emergency, hang up, and dial 9-1-1

participants are randomized

if you know the extension number

unilateral unknown

your call is important to us

I hope you are having a wonderful day

let’s get you to stand right here

ok, baby girl

I’ll just be with you in a minute

right on schedule

unknown unilateral

hello, is this ________? I’m calling about your appointment

is this

for medical appointments, dial 1

is this your first time?

your number, your emergency number your second emergency number

unknown

I have you down at DNTU

it means unknown

I hope you are having a wonderful day / Cathy Ferrell

(after a line by Miriam Calleja Shaw)

We will not give them
the grace of release
Let them choke on
their dollar signs and
red tape.
Because it makes sense
to make a woman wait.
Because it makes sense
to ignore her _____.
Meanwhile,
let’s dance,
sip cardamom lattes,
flash the world
lumps and scars

The goodbye / Clyde Long

Perched on the hillside for a
last look at my former place.

I see the roof and all around it’s
paved and painted, trees felled.

Its old gravel road gnawed knees,
my kids’ scars can prove it.

Next time we’ll gather elsewhere
to recollect our decades here.

Change can be sudden and sure.
Sitting here there is only the roof

and the highway’s always roar –
the lion’s last goodbye lullaby.

Hawk / Cecille Marcato

At the birdbath (a shock in late afternoon)
alert & alone (as all the other creatures fear her
swiveling head, her toes & talons),
the Cooper’s hawk drinks
& watches, drinks & stares, drinks.
Her glare is direct from glass orange
eyes & even though a window is between us
her look is like a conscience daring its host
to turn away. She sees me.

Sticker Sheet / Lizzy Polishan

My childhood was as holographic & jumbled as a Lisa Frank sticker sheet.

Nothing made sense & everything was beautiful.

An anthropomorphic panda waving

a paintbrush dripping rainbows

chased me forever up & down the stairs.

I was just excited someone wanted to touch my face.

I was always excited for no reason.

Everything was so pretty I wanted to lick it. The world a SpongeBob

sorbet ice-cream, two black gumball eyes.

In a recurring dream I climbed into a bottle & threw myself into the ocean.

I fell in love with a sunset-soaked sky, a turtle with a shell like Lego

hard candy. Two psychedelic dolphins, who were

my best friends, carried me through waves soaked in

swirled color like Hammond’s spun lollipops.

I kept waiting around to regenerate like my Tamagotchi.

I kept failing. I kept waking up & not being an egg.

The idea that it could end was not an idea until it happened.

Suddenly there was nothing in my hands. Suddenly I was

reaching for my sticker sheet & finding

empty space where before there had been things I used to loved.

Arson Poetica / Gordon Taylor

Each summer we burn

forests. It’s become a season

like winter. Blue

spruce. Hazy exhalations

of young cedar. Smoke

floating from the east

like a truth we can’t face.

Remember, our backyard silver

birch writing fierce autumn

red. We carved our names

in the trunk and built

books from the bark

as though its skin

belonged to us.

Wet eyed, we watch

the ruin in an Instagram

story. We follow

the flicker of lit matches

behind an ashy scrim.

Fleeing cars surrounded

by fields ablaze.

Countless flames

snapping like tiny mouths.

The sky is crowded

with rumor

a poem, accumulation

of small endings.

How close are we

to home. Why hide

behind fingerprint

smudged glass

if we believe

in evergreens.

Why don’t we rain.

Day 27 / Poem 27

moon churn / David Burrows

the cup fills
to lip
with blue light

the bees
are with
their honey

the gopis
dance
about Krishna

“surrender!”
sing the birds

“I’ll carry you
to the planting ground!”
says the wind
to the seeds

“I’ll transform you,”
says the fire
crackling
the dry
leaves
to smoke
and ash

tossed
on the waterway
end over end
the little pine cone
dreams
of being
a tree

the dark one
turns his ribs

into harp
strings
and plays
his hidden songs

“I’ll lift you to the blue!”
says the breeze to the kite

“I’ll spread you as butter,”
says the moon
churning
the ocean waves

I collect some good advice / Miriam Calleja

After a line by Leonard Cohen and Cathy Ferrell

Look how the mood takes you
smacks you off your feet
And when you think about it
it’s only a chemical dance
How we are swept to extremes
despite the warning, despite the knowledge
medio tutissimus ibis
you will go safely down the middle
when some cravings have been subdued
others will come
If you don’t become the ocean,
you’ll be seasick every day

look, how disaster didn’t strike again / Cathy Ferrell

(after a line by Miriam Calleja)

After the scream
we find midnight
cloth, blue velvet
draped around
shoulders.

Lightning kisses earth
dizzy, leaves mist of
ozone. Waltz with
fingerprints of plants.
Breathe
chemical dance

Landlocked
ocean
churns inside
skull.
We circle
the night

scarves of gauze

Reset / Dralandra Larkins

You been giving out parts of your hearts that were always meant to be yours
You been feeling incomplete forcing yourself in locked doors
You ought to let go and spirit take the wheel
And i know it ain’t easy but just sit back and see what’s reveal
See how your spirit guides show you what’s fake and what’s real
You can keep seeking validation from your peers
And be surprised when inauthenticity appears
You know growth takes time
Give yourself some grace
Some days you feel like floating
Other days the heaviness weighs
Both the good and bad are valid valuable feelings
We need the ups and downs to understand the duality in healing
We need to be capable of seeing ourselves that we have the capacity to see others
If we can learn to embrace our scars we can do the same for our family friends and lovers
Believe you will achieve goodness and health
Dont let the evil of humanity stop you from loving
Don’t let your fears stop you from who you’re becoming
Learn to accept all of you, Without all the judging.
Its time to stop sprinting from the past, time to stop struggling.

Blessings of St. Boniface in San Francisco / Clyde Long

Imagine when lost souls
find solace and safe sleep

in gentle worn pews
waking lit by stained glass.

Their demons are run off –
no death knocking tonight.

(Imagine others –
imagine other nights)

Blessings here are prayers
to forgive, to help, to love.

Drawing Lesson / Cecille Marcato

Pulling

millimeters

of lead

across a page

twisting

as you go

makes a simple line,

Point A

to Point B.

Inside

its holder

the pencil must be

sharp,

its angle

constant

for a uniform

line.

It can be

ephemeral

or last

centuries –

two kinds of power,

beauty made by hand.

Abecedarian Cento: After Death / Lizzy Polishan

DAY-28-CENTO-AFTER-DEATH.docx

Gratitude List – Bathhouse / Gordon Taylor

Day 26 / Poem 26

untitled / David Burrows

I’ve not heard you yet
ultimate music
but I hope you’re simple
like the robin’s call

life’s fire
be not long
in coming

some groggy dawn
like any other
the cock will crow
with the advent
of the sun
and there you’ll be
as colors brighter
air more crisp
promises kept

Scream into the wind / Miriam Calleja

After a line by Cathy Ferrell

We are fine here in this hell-made
fine down here with our wet cheeks
our jeweled lashes, fine with the blue
blue sky that you can grab right off its canvas
lady luck forgets to roll, fine, she says
you go ahead anyway. We’re fine
scribbling fine frustrations, fumbling
in our fine shadows. And look,
how disaster didn’t strike again.
We are just fine.

primal / Cathy Ferrell

On the days when
you can’t see past
your own lashes,
open the window, punch
out the screen. Lean, lean,
lean scream into
the wind. She will swallow
your tears, turn them
petrichor

he lets go a sprig / Clyde Long

it floats on a
journey ending
downstream

once his
then no one’s

Nude With Cat / Cecille Marcato

The view like yesterday’s & that day’s
yesterday in this quotidian loop;
beyond the mullions, a geometry of pitching
roofs, parapets, solid limestone lintels & quoins.
The sun is a painter, colors the whole district
peach & gold at this exact moment each afternoon.
At this exact moment each afternoon

a cat claws the crest rail of the room’s only chair,
its color robbed by the sun, a greedy star
that both gives & takes away.
Squinting through bare casements, a girl avoids
her companion, an undressed poser vying
for the spotlight, languishing before the cat.

After all, the artist has failed to name her
on his title card even though she draws
the eye. Even though she speaks for you.

from La Semaine des Quatres Jeudis, Balthus, 1949, oil on canvas.

Casino / Gordon Taylor

We’re going to gamble.

Stapled bills, left behind

on the kitchen table.

Spider web, bridge suspending

over brown metal rails of our spiraling

fire escape. Boots scraping metal

we descend in grey wool coats

holding hands. Raveling

mittens. Double helix. Fabric

of staying together.

Dusk, white shattering

into blue and violet as the sun nears

earth’s edge. Green flashes

the instant the sun’s upper rim

meets horizon. One body

enters another.

A clairvoyant said we’d never last

because my aura is orange

and yours, blue. True intimacy

is not only being close

to your partner, she said, a good

lover must be close to himself.

You explained my body to her

as though it was your own-

my brief arm right-angled

on a white sheet. A sharp cheekbone

in the dark. A couplet of legs.

How close

is lust to loss? Tongue

to an ache? The flash

of your diamond earring

to a spear?

At the casino, tokens clang

pushed into a slot

machine. Fire sparks, unseen.

Ceiling sprinklers spray a romance

of rain. My right-hand pulls

the lever. Storm pours into my cuff.

Alarms shriek. We teem

in frantic streams through emergency

exits. You’re gone. I fall

to the stairwell’s concrete landing

Chest an airless cave. Feet turned west.

Lips still wet with your spit.

Day 25 / Poem 25

four haiku/ David Burrows

seeds blown on the wind
seek warm and moist gentle earth
to plant their dream life

this field of roses
is choir singing skyward
universal song

the buzzing of bee
meets the wings of dragonfly
the wine flask opens

butterflies announce
hearts weigh only feather light
passage is granted

Citrus / Miriam Calleja

After my writing group in Poetry as Prayer and Writer’s Block by Cathy Ferrell

the writing makes me hungry
but especially the tears
I turn each into a want
four forkfuls of Tuesday’s risotto
eaten in an unruly fashion
sitting next to the cat
who thinks I’m all out of manners.
Tangerine peels falling in my wake
my thumb inside the next
before I’ve finished the first.
My mother suggests a tree—
thinking lemon. I dream of finding
a fork in that first persimmon¹.
I’d bend it with my useless
singular superpower. Then, bury it
like treasure, like the coin I threw
in the Fontana di Trevi, hoping
to return. And I know the shiny euro
was collected that same night.
But so what if I live with some
illusions, if tears only sometimes
make poetry, and cravings are
only sometimes justified? I think
I ought to give it a name,
sing for the biting winds. And even
when you are brave
so what if winter comes? Let it.

¹A somewhat reliable old wives’ tale in which the shape inside a persimmon seed may indicate the weather to expect the following winter. A fork shape indicates a mild winter.

Writer’s Block / Cathy Ferrell

Writer’s Block

You were proud,
all those years,
drinking only the driest red.
These days, you have embraced
an iced sauvignon blanc.
You paint your palate peach and kumquat.

What on earth is a finger lime?
You tried them once, with a friend.
She sliced one down the middle, handed you a half.
Each squeezed tiny pearls of juice .
I think you can eat the rind, you said
but it was bitter.
You both laughed
and said you’d write a poem.

What do you write when
the day has squeezed it all
and you become an unwanted rind?
Where is the pulp?

A blank page and one
blinking cursor,
puckering and tart

A friend who pours
you a glass

chilled sangria

Dirty Dishes / Dralandra Larkins

After Baking soda, white vinegar by Miriam Calleja & After Women who clean slates by Cathy FerrellDirty dishes

Dirty dishes
are left with residue
from the mouths
of people with the dirtiest secrets.
At the sink, I sink
into a pool of lies, again.
Just because someone wants
your attention,
doesn’t mean they have good intentions
or want to be your friend.
“Selfish and self-absorbed,”I say to myself.
With a sponge in hand, I began
scraping away food for too much thought.
Scrubbing away the past.
Hard scrubs manifest my thoughts into small suds.
The water runs hot, rinsing them down the drain.
Diluting memories of toxicity and shame
Rewarding myself with silver to wear
for all that I overcame.
At Dawn, I’ll chant to the ancestors,
summon the crows for rebirth
to embrace a new beginning
of a slate wiped clean.

Caresses Were Hands / Clyde Long

stowed away a jailed poet –
not that I wrote anything upsetting –
home is a solitary cell
talking with myself and my crack
below and its rhythms

back when caresses were hands
pleasures granted yours ours
sirens silent not about us –
my incarcerated mind wanders
along untraveled roads

my mouse    her velvet gray fur!
Our eyes don’t meet    way too much
we hide ourselves   touches lost

~~~~~~

we hide ourselves   touches lost
Our eyes don’t meet    way too much
my mouse    her velvet gray fur!

along untraveled roads
my incarcerated mind wanders
sirens silent not about us –
pleasures granted yours ours
back when caresses were hands

below and its rhythms
talking with myself and my crack –
home is a solitary cell
not that I wrote anything upsetting –
stowed away a jailed poet

Some Days: Cento / Cecille Marcato

some days you feel like
the ocean
an unabridged salt-green sea
a blue lagoon
a night lake
a river, a concrete pool
iridescent pool
vapor

some days you feel like
a woman on the edge
of an ocean swimming
all her life
some days you feel like sinking

a dish drowning in butter

under water I descend
into my body
the sea swells, a wave
comes and more waves
boiling, words tumble out
of every pocket

saved words: I found
the word for air again
and my name –
not a lullaby that thrives
without water

it lives in you like salt

some days you feel like
the smell of bitterness
is a night lake, a salt-green sea
some days you feel like
a survivor is the person who still prays
and prayed this lemon sweeter

some days I leave the ends
of my ribbons loose

centuries pass, drowning
lifeguard, I orchestrate
this moment

I am going to break your heart now

[Sources: Lizzy Polishan, Miriam Calleja, Cathy Ferrell, Clyde Long, Gordon Taylor, Dralandra Larkins, David Burrows, Khamil Riley, and Taylor Mallay]

Until We Become We / Khamil Riley

I am drawn to the bottle in moments like these
When my mind won’t quiet
And in my chest I can’t breathe
It is pretty embarrassing to be me
Everything I am pretending to be
Spills out onto the concrete
Transparent now
My tears pool into the dirt and I’m scared
Of how you see me
It’s times like these
When he starts to get handsy
And my eyes blur over cloudy
I believe
The lord is going to bless me.
For the heart I have
is big enough to
cradle even my enemies to sleep
Gently I rock them
but not the way they rock me
Shaken to my core
Even my spleen could tell stories
About wars like these
Call me sick
Or lost in love
The journey still
Befuddles me
To the point even poetry
Gets lost somewhere
Between him and me
Oh, how the pursuit
Of pleasure
Above All Else
Feels like holy convocation
Between him and the Blessed Be.
I praise and raise this glass
Until we
Become we.

EULOGY / Gordon Taylor

in the copse

in the hollow hollow

where love goes

missing where you live

now the riverine trees

hold you this

is your corner

void in the void

where leaf corpses

fall and echoes

speak to each other

and squirrels ribbon

and run through

the hollow

Day 24 / Poem 24

just north of Mumbai / David Burrows

while she talks

I imagine

me on a motorbike

with bags of pulses

and grains

making it through

the terrain

saving

the sixteen thousand

children

that die

each year

in the hills

of Thane, India

where families

live hidden

outside

networks

of roads

schools

work

the hospital is sixteen miles

away, she says

if Raj is sick, I’ve no way

to take him

Raj has happy eyes

and fidgets

he lives at the center

for malnourished children

with his Mom

two oxen inches away

eat hay

an orange robed sadhu

stares and chants

om shanti

an hour from million

dollar homes in Mumbai

and Bollywood

I see them cooking

the beans and rice

I’ve brought them

in rural forests

on fires of

sticks and fallen

logs glowing

with red flames

thousands of Raj’s

alive

The Deal / Miriam Calleja

“The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco.” – Pablo Escobar

Even when we are not afraid
We surf on fear
We are silence, knowing looks
We are hiding what you cannot handle
Slinking in whispers, making our face
We are handling what you cannot hide

How to be the unbothered cat in a room full of people / Cathy Ferrell

If you can’t hide, sit
Choose a focal point

Aim your gaze but don’t
really look

Your feet will feel
the floor and wish

it was earth
You want to be

outside
Slink

into nothing
Dream awake, find

you can
fly

Untitled / Dralandra Larkins

My aura is the brightest in the room
This little lantern of mines
shines like a city on a hilltop
that cannot be stopped
nor hidden nor extinguished
I’m won’t conform to your corruption- your image, vision, or expectations.
I removed the veils, escaped the matrix!
This ain’t an Artificial Intelligent version of me, I’m waiting to become
This is I’m Langston Hughes rhythm and blues, Baldwin’s Native Son!
This is poetic tongue, speaking it lyrical
This is weaving words with wisdom
metaphors and syllables! Storytelling is ritual.
I Prayer up, summoned my angels
and told demons to meet me in the spiritual. This is poetic tongue, speaking it lyrical!

Dead sea detour / Clyde Long

Headed south toward Mexicali
past Indio, past Mecca
corralled in purple box canyons.
Descended to a dead sea.

Parked in a lonely seaside lot
with a graveyard seashore view
of desiccated fish and shorebirds.

Green and red feral parrots remain –
Sinatra and Beach Boys gone;
Martinis and perfect waves gone.

It’s 120 degrees at noon, sun’s
baking the dead fish and birds.
The stench to dead sea me
is salty, like gusts of death.

Origin Story With Scholia / Cecille Marcato

Origin-Story-With-Scholia-10.23_24.2024

Kindly Copy & Deliver To: @prince_of_denmark @the_real_king_of_ithaca @the_yellow_flower_by_the_lake / Lizzy Polishan

Etc.

I am going to break your heart now, says the future

from the past. The message reaches me,

faintly, on carbon copy paper. I am not afraid

of what I understand to be true. I am in the cordiform bed

in The Hemingway Suite in the iconic hotel in the capital

city in the beautiful country with the beautiful

name I can’t pronounce. I am gulping a sparkling

green aphrodisiac & you are my lover, smoking a foreign

green cigarette. Everything feels

filmy. After sex, it’s easy to stare at the ceiling & want to be remade

in the image & likeness of your lover, briefly dazzling

vermillion light. I never meant to drink all your balmy

possibilities. No one ever told me what was on the other side of all these paper

straws. I understand, I will say. Once, to say I love you, you pulled

two plane tickets from your jeans pocket & disappeared. Had you woven

me a festive intarsia sweater, we could have bought

a fuckton of eggnog & spent our first Christmas together with

this adorable black stray dog.

Cancer Cells as Pop Art / Gordon Taylor

G-Taylor-CANCER-CELLS-AS-POP-ART-

Day 23 / Poem 23

untitled / David Burrows

an orange haired fiend

like Batman’s Joker

feeds off the frustrations

of proud boys

neo nazis

evangelicals

old white men

and ordinary people

to vie

for a nation

they think

he’s honest

like them

he is an animal

that smells fear

prejudice

hatred

and wields

its energy

from the playbook

of Orwell’s 1984

and dictators

of the past

the people swoon

in the rhetoric

quench thirst

in his words

like incantations

not knowing

he can’t restore

coal, cars, guns

narrow faith

family, flag

there’s no going

back to Ozzie

and Harriet

Mayberry

the fatted calf

on the table

The Wailer / Miriam Calleja

After Cathy Ferrell’s La Llorona Justifies Herself

The great thing about this age
is that when I find myself justifying
I stop and count to ten.
I reach a hand out, grateful for
the limits of my mind,
the consequences. So, listen to my friend:
If not us, someone worse.
You would be wise
to feel your way through a poem
count your visions
find a place to scream
and when you find yourself
in a sonnet
turn
turn
turn

The ballerina in my old jewelry box reconsiders the day / Cathy Ferrell

The earth repeats
chaine¹ turns
across a pitch-black stage
loop after loop after loop

I turn to
the window. I cannot find
my spot². I am not
enough.

You remind me,
we are all imposters.

I leave the ends of my ribbons loose,³
rest on a rusted coil.

¹A chain-like turn in which the dancer loops from one place to another
²To avoid getting dizzy, a dancer fixes her focus on one secure spot
³Tidiness and control are a ballet dancer’s signature. One must always be tucked in, neatly.

1. Gratitude is free
2. Forgiveness is healing and to forgive it is to be healed
3. Save the simple things for in times of an emergency
4. Build a fort with your favorite kid. Children are medicine for imagination and healing
5. That competition was rigged

Half Life / Clyde Long

– in Patrick’s memory

I released you to the lake,
forever to cold depths
on a million-years journey —
you and water molecules.

Missing you has a half-life
over fifteen years so far.

Last night we were there
by a darkened Tahoe pier.
Too many stars to name –
we marveled at the blur.

The Way They Left It / Cecille Marcato

bruise so painful she stood
on the plane ride home

police at the corner he’d dared
her to hail but nothing

showed & he looked
respectable stolen journal,

broken china sepia girl
in a photo smiling

through shattered glass
community property community

disbelief he seems so nice
it was the times

a skull had to be fractured
a bullet lodged he could

do anything she could do
nothing but one day leave

& not put him in the poem

& even that took time.

Abecedarian Cento, in which Athena’s Mother Prays to Catholic God / Lizzy Polishan

Adrift at a dextral spiral’s galactic edge, God said I will
Break time’s heart.
Coyotes do not question.
Do not follow them to their camp pitched in
Essential shadow, moving and being, the image as its source
Fragmental as a new year.
Green is the night, green kindled
Heat, breezes, vibrations—We are never not a part of everything. Like
Icarus, I want the light to love me back, in glowing strokes of late
June, amassed in my hands like precious ore, and I with nowhere to
Keep it. Like everything else,
Lust becomes inexact. Stop sleeping with guys with
Messiah complexes. Ask
Nothing of any human.
Once when I was recovering, covering again myself, I confused the cracks of distraction between
Parted legs with his attempts to treat them like
Queens, his way of reminding me we’ve only stopped for
Rest, a short rest, under gnarled
Sour grapes. Three years of
Time travel, between him and me. Time holds us together: there is an
Urgent search for another planet just like earth.
Velvet Jesus hangs from a loose nail, today is
Water’s birthday, the moon is closing his eyes, could we
Xerox the moon?
Yes, I aimed for mercy—but came only close as building a cage around
Zeus’ forehead.

“Study for Belief with Lines from “Star Trek: The Original Series” by Dayna Patterson
“Questions my Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him” by Nancy Willard
“Ode to the Tiniest Dessert Spoon in All Creation” by Karen An-Hwei Lee
“Light and Dark” by Barbara Howes
“The Candle A Saint” by Wallace Stevens
“My Hair Burned Like Berenice” by Ruth Award
“The Koan of Skin” by Dane Cervine
“Late Shift” by Amy Woolard
“On June Blossoming in June” by Karen An-Hwei Lee
“Magical Thinking” by Kaitlyn Airy
“Rick James in the Garden of Eden” by Amy Thatcher
“I’m not a religious person but” by Chen Chen
“Terms and Conditions” by Cindy Juyoung Ok
“Mr. Cogito and Certain Mechanisms of Memory” by Zbigniew Herbert
“Drinking for free” by Taneum Bambrick
“Fist and Palm” by Carl Phillips
“Sea Grapes” by Derek Walcott
“moonlight” by Jinhao Xie
“Earth-Like” by Megan Pinto
“Mississippi Waning” by Serena Rodriguez
“Chimeras” by Brian Sneeden
“Questions my Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him” by Nancy Willard
“Essay on Craft” by Ocean Vuong

It’s Hard to Hate the Dead / Gordon Taylor

I was dreaming.*

Night cold collided with morning’s

gathering heat.

Your cry

was deep

as crags feet in fog’s doubt.

I watched the doctor knead your chest

like dough. Your lips

stained with blue. Don’t leave

hanging.

Is it easier to save someone

you don’t love?

We once watched a stranger

pull a drowning dog from the river.

His owner froze

on shore, holding an empty

leash.

Is it easier to forgive the dead?

Wake me up. I remember

a driveway, mud

scattered from tire treads.

After you hit

your high.

After our greatest fight a death metal rattled

under the car hood.

Wake up.

Before you go.

Go. I’ll plant a forest

of foxglove at your grave.

I’ll forgive you. If you take me

dancing

tonight.

I‘ll watch the smudged sinew

of your bare back, soaked blue jeans

slipping down in the rain.

If you jitterbug

into my brain.

If you take my hand.

Take me

with you.

*with lines from Wake Me Up Before You Go Go by Wham

Day 22 / Poem 22

untitled / David Burrows

I light a candle
for our imperfect
clasp
interlocking fingers
on a hike
into high mountains

I can’t know
your thoughts
we’re both alone
waiting
for chrysanthemum
to open

your trust
I keep
like a prayer
scribbled
on a scrap
of paper
hidden
in a small box

one day
we’ll embrace
merge
like colors
in an impressionist
garden
flowers revealing
their petals
and scents
golden like the sun
sweet like you

The Horns of Għaġuża / Haguza

After Maltese Mythology and Cathy Ferrell’s Mama ain’t happy

Ja Xbat ħabbat, ma mejjiltx il-għamuda u ma qtiltx l-għaġuża
Oh, violent February, you have not bent the tent pole
and you have not killed the crone
Maltese Mythology by Stephan D. Mifsud (Merlin Publishers, 2023)

Do you know what they do
to women like you?

In Lent, children waited
for the second Thursday
to see her “so plump”
plummeting to her death.
The old hag thrown out
of parish church belfry.
Great fun!
sexagenarios de ponte dejicere¹

On the second Wednesday
kattenstoet, the killing of creatures
associated with the witch.
Can a black cat, thrown out of the belfry,
land on its feet?

Christ is tempted in the second week.

He waits for rain, the horns of the crone²,
the old year still alive and kicking.

¹Latin; Old people should be thrown off a bridge
²The end of the year used to be associated with February and not December (the tenth month).

La Llorona Justifies Herself¹ / Cathy Ferrell

Banshees²
and crying mothers
confiscate children
tuck heads under water
fill the emptiness of lungs

Who speaks for the women?

Our mouths are filled with
cotton, still.
Still. Still.
When is our turn?

Stop your ears all you like

If you will not
hear us, we will
s h r i e k
anyway. We steal

souls before yours
can quiver

If not us, someone

worse

¹In Mexican folklore, La Llorona drowned her children after learning of her husband’s infidelity; harbinger of doom; haunter of water; hear her cry; weep forever
²In Gaeilic folklore, a female spirit who mourns; harbinger of death; hear her keen; someone will die

Reset / Dralandra Larkins

You been giving out parts of your hearts that were always meant to be yours

You been feeling incomplete forcing yourself in locked doors
You ought to let go and spirit take the wheel
And I know it ain’t easy but just sit back and see what’s reveal
See how your spirit guides show you what’s fake and what’s real
You can keep seeking validation from your peers, then, surprised when insecurities appears.
Always Give yourself some grace
Some days you feel like floating
Other days the heaviness weighs
Both the good and bad are valid valuable feelings
We need the ups and downs to understand the duality in healing
We need to be capable of seeing ourselves that we have the capacity to see others
If we can learn to embrace our scars we can do the same for our family friends and lovers
Believe you will achieve goodness and health
Dont let the evil of humanity stop you from loving
Don’t let your fears stop you from who you’re becoming
Learn to accept all of you, Without all the judging.
Its time to stop sprinting from the past, time to stop struggling.

Easy for Flowers / Clyde Long

– after Alicia Ostriker’s “The Moment on Stage II”,
I heal this wounded world says the tulip stretching her spine

Healing is easy for flowers; beauty is a salve.
Behold our cups of petals reaching up
seducing honey bees to collect our pollen.

A woman with her dog smiles passing
         my bed of tulip brothers and sisters.
                     She coos over their stout stalks and variegated
                              purple and magenta colors, “beautiful!”

Her dog wags, a petal stuck to his nose.
She wants a world healed to be this way.
It starts with a single petal.

There Is No Language in this Country: A Cento / Cecille Marcato

Tonight we wish upon the darkest star.
Our end starts here but we don’t know
that now. The blackest sail ever raised,
a secret blue emptiness behind
the pleasure of the whole thing.

It’s here I keep getting stuck halfway
between wonder and distance.
How dangerous it is where we sit
on the side of things that have
no language, knees touching
at times, when I had no words.
The grammar of the calendar,
time in the physical.

iii

Imagination loves
the wall of a building,
loves the floor and the square
window that looks out on it
as the beams and window glass let
go of themselves. With all
the imagination, the magic, you saw
lights so familiar they might have been
ours shining back from the future.
We’ll use anything
to find the ones who must be found.

A sentence is an idea, a feeling
for the sun before it rises like
the moment just before you forgot
what it was you were about to say.
Because there are things
we have no words for, metaphors
link the known and unknown.
But when I say whether, the sentence
may be thinking, even so –
like that, only all the time.
Perhaps we’re here only to say
death in a hundred different ways.

Here bells are ringing (resounding),
roosters crowing and the doves’ wings
flapping. O these swallows! How they ache
supreme, exhausted chimney sweeps
of the spaces between words.
Dialects everywhere you look.
Here, the sun will return
whether you smile or cry,
clap or burn candles.

It’s always the day after the day after
here. A transformer thrums without relent.
The quell night blues above.
The quell night blues: stillness
eating the absence, a kind of stopping
that will pass for peace — a knock
at the door when no one’s home.
What’s gone makes what’s left silent.
Blue, I write beneath the skylight.

vii

There are things I’ve wanted to say,
blue notes in the margins
of everything. I needed
your lips, needed your body near me.
This mattered more to me
than anything.
We didn’t get it right.

[Sources: James Agee, Tom Andrews, Joseph J. Capista, C.P. Cavafy, Linda Gregg, Marie Howe, Bill Knott, Larry Levis, Matthew Olzmann & Linda Pastan.]

Pink Cupcake / Lizzy Polishan

I am the last charm on your middle-school charm bracelet // Sometimes you take me
between your fingers & say my mom gave me this for my birthday, which I think is my name //
Once I was surrounded by beautiful things: shooting stars a sparkly horseshoe red dice a lucky
clover // I don’t know what I am 1 // I used to think about it a lot // Now I am holding my breath &
onto one rusted link // What I am seems less important now that I am all alone // When I don’t
know how much longer you will keep wearing me // How much longer I can keep holding on

THE PLEASURE OF NAMING YOURSELF / Gordon Taylor

~Burroughs’ basic argument is that language is a physical, viral infection which has developed a parasitic or symbiotic relationship with the human body.

There’s gold in our eyes.

It lives in us like salt.

Too much salt kills a heart.

That’s a fact

allegedly. At death,

Ancient Egyptians weighed hearts against feathers

to know if the dead were light enough

to journey home.

Compare the weight

of waiting for a mind to change

to the dewy arcs of an abandoned spider web

above the door. Is the web

an archive or a battlefield?

What wisdom does it hold?

I asked the spider.

She said a body is made of muscle.

Muscle fibres are a series

of connected webs.

The quality of truth depends

on the speaker. I believed

my lover’s version of my body

for years. His language floated

over us at the speed

of rumour. He told me to drink

the river until my heart grew

a current. I stood with him,

feet dressed in waves, until night

inked upward from the horizon,

a sentence punctuated

by a ginger moon.

I know my heart

holds a river.

I hold

this heart.

I name it.

Day 21 / Poem 21

untitled / David Burrows

the rising sun
at eye level
blinds
as I cough and shake
wishing the heat
would evaporate
the swamp
in the chest

a passerby
shuffles
past
in the park quadrangle
another walks confidently
talking as they go
and a muscled man
bounds
in full run

everyone completes
multiple laps
we watch them pass
round and round
me with wheezes
and tissues
Benny, still, in my lap
surveying other dogs

the sun moves
is blocked
by trees
I can see
any movement I make
prayers that bring
a slight gleam
meditations
with the tiny glow
of fireflies
will complete the journey
even barely pick up feet
the upper body a block
of cement

The unbearable haiku waits for the last leaf to drop / Miriam Calleja

After Cathy Ferrell’s Last Leaf

An empty feeling

flushes my insides today

tragic waiting drop

Mama ain’t happy / Cathy Ferrell

She gathers detritus, weaves
twigs and broken pencils into her hair

(Under the roof, a rumble,)

No one looks her in the eye

(a gust down the hall)

Dust scampers into warrens
beneath the couch and lost
socks tuck their heels

(Crash! Cymbals! Flash!)

When lightning strikes
the clock on the stove, the family
freezes.

(precipitation)

In her wake, the door lists
on one hinge,

(aftermath)

a streak of lemon on the gleaming floor.

Dralandra / Dralandra Larkins

It usually goes, “How do you pronounce your name?”
I go, “Dra-lan-dra.” They go, oh, Dralawndra. I say no. They go “oh, Drelondra? No, I mean Dre,
I mean Dru, no, Drugs? Yes, Drugs. Hi, Drugs!”

I’ve been holding my breath, tightening my jaw and swallowing my tongue

for far too long, oh, what? Culture got ya tongue?

Too much bass in my name like the ngoma drum?

All this black Atlantic washed over your privilege now wading your speech?

Not able to pronounce the authenticity,

not able to pronounce anything authentic

So, you’d rather code-switch it

for a sound more convenient, more coroperable?

A sound less threatening since the D drowns the salvia that left you breathless?

A sound easy to swallow- something more lenient?

When you say my name,

can’t you taste my mothers blood? 24 hours of sweat, labor, back bent in prayer, my name is a
manifestation of my mothers love!

Been diluting my name to comply and conform, been doing this since the name Dralandra was
born.

I dilute my name not ever once correcting them when it’s mispronounced.

Trying to apparel to a country who accepts everyone history,

Everyone’s name but mine

Too ashamed

to make a big deal of labeled the Black girl that fuss the Black girl who’s name is the sound of
the bullet that was taken for love

When you have a foreign name or a name that sounds uniques

People’s tongues tickle their tonsils, lazily

and sleeps in the back of their throat.

My name is not a lullabye of sweet syllables and soft sounds, this D drowns –

These vowels come from the growl of the beast, Chicago’s gutter

and the screaming souls of Mississippi’s plantations;

this is sugarcane and plantain!

Photo Bomb / Clyde Long

He was at move up there far above me
spiraling up and down, round and round
halting then starting, pausing to look
around and check down, chattering loudly
and twitching his full bushy tail.

Farther down the trunk he appeared,
sharp beady eyes darting side to side.
Upon my move, phone camera ready
he froze then hid behind the base of
the palm tree blocking my view.

Soon I spotted him peeking my way
with a look at once wary and pissed –
he had been up there searching for a
mate all afternoon until I messed it up.
I got a photo, but didn’t get his name.

Rescue / Cecille Marcato

Frank found him working
guard duty at a salvage yard

& he became a living study
in nature versus nurture

since his owner wanted him
mean & (believing the myth)

fed him gunpowder.
For a Dobie he ain’t

no good at guardin,’
the junkman said.

Frank gave the guy
a fifty for the dog

took him home & chained him
in the yard for seven days

for seven days, sat
just beyond the chain’s reach

with bits of steak: Here!
Butch! Here, Butch!

flank filet skirt strip
porterhouse Delmonico

He did as much for me
minus the chain & I leaned

against him, too, until he
cracked; ate metaphorical meat

like this uncropped,
undocked dog, always

hating fireworks – not the booms
so much as the smell of

burnt black powder
left hanging forever in the air.

The Turtle / Lizzy Polishan

here :: the green womb
sweet :: the sequined guava
what immaculate animals
dawn caught!
those humans :: nude schooners
the disk of the sky:: a dream
velvet antlers slaughter swarming
gnats laughter in the blistering
mist dissolves

FIDELITY / Gordon Taylor

I will be your habit

bowl. Fill me

with everything you think

you might lose.

Fill me with keys.

Fill me with your loose

change. Leave me

empty in morning.

I will wait

by the door.

Day 20 / Poem 20

untitled / David Burrows

under the cherry tree
in autumn
a plastic owl
scares away birds
from red fruit
that hint
at the flowering
to come

a society
of leaves
quiver
in the wind

under the cherry tree
in October
I hold my hand
on your heart
hoping
we’re safe
protecting
our pink blossoms
circling fingertips
in your fur
Sent from my iPad

Puzzle / Miriam Calleja

~~I cross myself out~~
A cold spell follows false fall.
I leverage randomness in my favor
blinking luck into non-existence
a dish drowning in butter and garlic

feet floating in a warm sea.
The spell breaks
~~I can’t find the magic wand~~
hours pass and I’m still trying
to put the pieces together

~~fortune favors the prepared.~~
But what of those who grieve in preparation?
Or she who spoke of her death
ten, fifteen years before the deed—
yet, when the day came, had dying wishes.

Last Leaf / Cathy Ferrell

too
tired to
turn, anew.

how long has it
been? wait
for the fall
that never comes.

suspend
from one
tenuous stem,
wait for a breath

Survivor / Dralandra Larkins

My father was physically abusive towards my mother and growing up, I used to question God. I would ask simple questions like, “why?” Why was I born in this family? Why did I live in this ghetto ass neighborhood? Why did mama have to work so hard? Why did daddy use his fist to express his emotions? Why mama, why me? We
Survivors tend to ask ourselves what did we do to deserve harm? We question our worth and our purpose. We question our lives. But there’s a quote by Andréa Dykstra who says “in order to truly love who we are we cannot hate the experiences that shape us.”I want us to switch our thoughts from what’s wrong with you to what’s right with you? What’s that light in you? That fight in you?

They tried to dim your righteousness
and take your faith. The angels had other plans for your grace. So, it’s time to bury your brokenness-that hurt,
it’s time to dust the ashes
and blossom from dirt.
You’re healed now
and the wounds from their words
can no longer hurt. You’ve
pulled yourself by the bootstraps
and out of the hole, stop
picking at your wounds,
drowning in sorrow,
so blessings can adequately flow
its time
to simply let go.

You’ve been clenching the rope
that keeps you bonded to your past, release thoughts of who wasn’t there for you
and what didn’t last- of the soul ties, word spells friends and family tried to cast.

There are tests, trials, and trauma that you’ve been faced to go through,
allow God to use your pain
as a vessel and expose you,
mold you through affliction. Your mission isn’t done.
So, except who you are and all you’ve become!
The weapon was formed, yet the battle you’ve won.
A survivor is the lotus
that blooms without sun.
A survivor- more than just a conqueror, more than just a fighter.
It’s the flower
that thrives without water.
It’s 1 in 4 women who are victims of a brutal fist fight- it’s someone’s daughter!
Its the the father
too ashamed to speak of their abuse
policies paint him as perpetrator. It’s 1 in 2
who feel alone.
It’s 1 in 4 who burn pages of their journals just to erase, just to escape.
Its 1,000 voices silenced from stigma.
Tongues sliced for honesty.
Its 1 in 4 sexually assaulted bodies
who never want to feel
Their hands,
again. Better yet,
just never feel, again.

Suicide is committed
every 11 minutes
by someone who pretends. Smiles though suffering, may it be your neighbor,
co-worker, cousin or best friend.
It’s the person fighting
to be free, to be
released from depression
that pins them
to the mattress of their bedspring.
A survivor is the mother
shot six times with a revolver
by a person they once made love to. Its Caitlin Howard, Jaden Hills, Jessica Espinoza, Marlon Faulter, Jasmine, Tyesha Davidson, Patrick, Sadiyah Ahmed, it’s Sofia.

A survivor is the person who still prays
after pain.
It’s the person who chooses love
after trauma, after trauma, a diamond
after pressure!
It’s Hajars House.
A house of hope to stand on the roof of independence. Alnaaji is the human
who chooses
forgiveness.

College class at 68 / Clyde Long

We are asynchronous
we are hybrids
we do digital self-guided learning
with weekly .ppt slides
and YouTube video clips.
So download it along with pdfs
and lecture transcripts too –
ready for open notes quizzes.
Pro tip if age 68: print out
all that mess, three-hole
punch it, and file it away in
a three-ring binder or two –
then own quizzes and tests.
Age 68’s way to an A!

Recap / Cecille Marcato

It was the year Russians invaded
but not us (as once was feared).
It was the year after
the year we nearly froze
to death — & the year that water
from the cold tap scalded
the whole summer long.
It was the year we removed our masks
& babies got Covid,
the year we had to move
& it rained twice,
just twice
& still there were mosquitoes.
It was the year of dread
even with the news turned off –
& shots of cortisone, plasma
& stem cells for pain
& crying;

the year that Michael moved
to Mexico and Jane went
to rehab as a surprise; the year
that Judy broke her arm
& it turned out to be
her shoulder & Katie’s
book came out without a tour.
It was the year I dreamed you back
(again) & because it was a dream
you didn’t stay; the same year
I froze up driving on a flyover
that was too close to Heaven
to feel safe on Earth.
It was the year the cat died
& my toe turned black & we put
our masks back on.
It was the year
we stopped struggling against
ourselves & just gave in.
It was the year that everyone
became old & just gave in.

Ghost / Lizzy Polishan

I am a real ghost     I am not
made of paper or bedsheet
I don’t have any hands     I am
not trying to scare you I only want
a glass of water & to be
your friend     Please don’t turn off
the bathroom sink if it turns
spontaneously on     I am still
drinking the water straight
from the facet because
I still have no hands   I lost them
in the war     I forgot
which one   It was terrible
& long ago     I did make it home
  I did die in my bedroom which
is now our bedroom, though my bed
was much smaller than yours   I won’t
bother you except for the water
   I like to sit on your bed & stare
at your face     I like the way you play
with all your little machines   If the light
flickers you should know I’m using
my teeth to move the switch     I am
saying hi   You can say hi back

PLATITUDE LIST – DAY WHENEVER / Gordon Taylor

Benzo
diazepines. Can’t breathe with ‘em. Can’t sleep
without ‘em. I mean we’re drawn
to the familiar, even if the familiar hurts
us. Classic dialectic, I tell the psychiatrist.

I’ve been taking these tiny calm bombs for years.
The weening is endless. I’m a baby.
Around week three into withdrawal I noticed
a veil over my eyes, a grey cataract.
My limbs seemed a gather

of scratched skin, muscle boiled to vapor.
Something kills every body, every Dad said.
I’m grateful for platitudes. My Dad told me to, “sit quiet”
when I was anxious. He never smoked
~~but his lungs still turned to scar.~~

~
After I was therapied, I learned my childhood
wasn’t what I thought, like undressing
the truth of Santa. Or Odysseus. Or Darth
Vader. It’s all context. But that is a platitude.

You need something to believe
or you’ll die, Dad used to say. Choose
~~a direction. Give me a hint, I begged him.~~

Somewhere in the odyssey, the boy
is attacked, but mistakes it for love.
~~Remember that? He begins confusing~~
hurting oneself with motivation.

You’re simplifying how traumatized people re-enact neglect
the psychiatrist scolds, half looking at me.
~~Her lids seem heavy, eyes open a slit. Her voice~~
reminds me of the Apple Notes font. Easy

on the senses. This font must be taught in medical schools.
She says my mistake is that I seek to acquire mental
health, like b-ball sneakers or a pearl necklace .

We’re on a zoom call. I’ve forgotten to wipe
my mouth. Spaghetti sauce smudges
the corners. I look like the Joker.

The rTMS treatments are making me superhuman
I report. It’s like small bolts of lightning
against the left prefrontal cortex. Euphoria
induced. You can’t know joy
until you have known sadness, she frowns.

I roll my eyes. Humans can’t exist without language.
We’re annoying, I explain,. We find
anything without one name frightening. Do you think
your mother loved you, she asks.

Mom is very good at english, I say.
I think you’re evading the question, she says.

I’m a poet. I’m talking about one thing
and meaning another.
~
There’s been a murder. The PET scan shows
my pre-frontal cortex is dead. After
I was molested I believed my family died. My siblings
left me. Mom rolled over. Dad told me to
sit quiet and watch clouds move across the sky.

Do you think that writing is an act of rebellion?
Did speechlessness compel me to write?
I wouldn’t know, says the Psychiatrist.
We could explore those questions

in our next session. Wait, I say, holding up my hand.
I’ve thought of a better question. If I hand you a fig
and a wasp flies from it— should I fear the fig—

if I cross out the monster—depression—
what happens?—Wasn’t the Odyssey about a war
survivor —trying to travel home—
trying to breathe?

Day 19 / Poem 19

Inside the Ordinary (on Fabian Ospina’s painting “Poolside”) / David Burrows

a concrete pool

is a blue lagoon

a cocktail drink

with pink umbrella

and scents of violets

inside the ordinary

a rainbow

rhapsody

within city green

a forest

in a yellow wall

butter

Keep it together / Miriam Calleja

A Cento with lines from Cathy Ferrell

One hand clutches
we reach out and grasp old stars
heart yearns for all things beyond
(inside, a Banshee)
we pass through many
many lives
we hexagon ourselves
surface
we breathe wide
daring to
feel a tingle
Listen!
keep it together
Won’t you dissolve with me?
Before sun the first taste
nothing left to wipe away
we spin years. We loop.
One button with two holes

Women who dream / Cathy Ferrell

(A Golden Shovel poem)

Take me to that place some
lucky women find, between remember and forget. Time
tightropes, here. Day and night teeter at equal intervals. I see it
just within my reach. Skry and search. You will
find me perched there. We could be
stardust. Let’s wander the
tails of old comets. Heave the last
of the moons. Here we equinox, sip on time.

(some time it will / be the last time, from Miriam Calleja Shaw’s poem Remember)

Listen to / Clyde Long

Listen to quiet songs
birds sing
in intimacy.
Listen to carrion crows
caws, whispers.
Listen like chicks
to mother songs and
father songs;
Listen to songs sung
before they hatch.
Listen to songs sung
not of mates or treasure.
Listen for divine songs –
angel’s songs.

He returns from the dead / Cecille Marcato

on bits of paper
in handwriting
that stomps a footprint
on my chest

in a photo
or a keychain

                         in the body
                         of someone
                         working
                         at the half-price
                         bookstore

whose gait twins
his, height the same

whose face supports
like architecture

whose eyes pierce
my cornea
grow hands to clinch
my gut

                                                    in dreams
                                                    or nightmares (still
                                                    blessed visitations
                                                    because

sometimes
I pretend

to need a book
& he’s not there).

untitled creation poem / Lizzy Polishan

i have a pet cat     i have to create him
every night     every night i hold down
the shadow of his paw with the toe
of my boot & pull his body off
the tarmac     we live in a boat, which is
made of leaves     he licks the river
where we are floating & tells me it is
milk    i tell him he’s mistaking starlight for
flavor & a mother     he says he forgot
where he came from    all he remembers is
a nameless darkness that named him
& pushed him into a triangle world of warm
light, which was soft & tasted like a pearl

of milk

More Life / Khamil Riley

Fall in love with yourself first.
With your life,
With your breath,
With the fact that you’re alive and
so on and so forth.
Let us begin with a question.
Where were you when you had your first
reckoning?
I was sat alone on bench
in what I can only describe as
the underworld. Way down under
Light started to look like dark,
Floating turned to sinking and
The ground turned to fire.

am getting cooked.
I can’t swallow the words fast enough to
get out of this boiling pot. I am going to burn alive
through this transformation
I think I’m supposed to enjoy the burn?
Consider change something other than
just the devil and his mind games,
though he does play those too.
I pray to God every night for rescue.
I believe He is answering
even if I don’t see it.
I believe that I am taken care of
even if I can’t pree it.
I believe He has my best interest at heart.
Someone
has my best interest at heart.
I’ll learn to praise Him in art and dance
For He gave me those gifts
and it’d be rude of me to discard them.
He told me to write this poem.
He told me to sing this song.
To celebrate this love
and this heart of mine
that so often gets me in trouble.
So,
Riffling through the rubble,
I’m not sure how this life ends.
No one does,
But I’d say
I’m more than okay
with going out with a bang

GRATITUDE LIST – DAY NINETEEN / Gordon Taylor

no psychiatrist teaches you to laugh.

first, laugh.

first, laugh and linger in small

gladness found in mental health waiting

rooms as you stare with the crowd

at blinded windows. i’m grateful

no one wants to talk about rTMS

treatments. i can’t explain them.

it has to do with magnets

pulling sadness from you.

does it hurt, you ask?

less than wanting to die.

first, stand in the fear of your heart

knowing how to speed

and stop, nod to the hydrangea reaching for bees

and the little shimmer sedum

crushed by worker’s boots in the community garden

making space for tending, for stems

to mend, for next summer’s fiercer

green. i’m grateful i’m too sad to be in awe

because if I was, my mouth would be open

and random things would fly in and land

on my tongue, like airplanes, dragonflies and Superman.

i’m grateful for Chopin, my chenille couch, a plush

stuffed shark my father gave me. Most people

keep a pocket full of smooth stones to roll

through their fingers as they panic

but I don’t. Stones remind me of Virginia Woolf

weighted down under a rumpled river blanket.

Weighted blankets prevent fidgeting

my psychiatrist told me. Try sleeping with one

draped across chest and arms.

Strait jacket? Straight

jacket? See how i queered that?

i’m grateful for homophones, a single life

with many meanings— and my mind

though it’s trying to kill me

by turning grass into mud like a rude, disgruntled

translator, turning oranges into pulp

pureeing bread and peanut butter.

but peanut butter is already pureed, dumb

translator. i’m grateful for the blender

because of its electric roar. I don’t need

to yell if i use a blender at every meal.

i have trouble swallowing. There is a lot of world

to swallow. i don’t know how snakes do it.

have you ever watched a boa constrictor swallow

a moose? have you ever watched a python eat itself?

my psychiatrist said, first, write

a gratitude list. there are histories

i don’t want to repeat. we can debate

if suffering gives life

texture or flattens us like a car

rolling over a pigeon.

first, emerge from bed. muse

on today’s weather. we have brick

thick humidity. we have our bright

and dying sun. This is not

To the Lighthouse

set in my bedroom. this is just

to the light.

more tomorrow.

Day 18 / Poem 18

untitled/ David Burrows

her eyes are red
calling for the end
her seven children bombed
by a bully
who says he’s threatened
though david could
sling a thousand bullets
at him and it’d be
harmless as rain
on his iron body

he says he won’t be cut
or bleed again
he kills babies
calling them shields
of his enemy
forgetting their names
as if his blood won’t pool
stop like everybody’s
turn putrid
in time
his muscles
grow old and thin

Swallowing without bread / Miriam Calleja

After Remember by Christina Rossetti

Remember that some time it will be the last time
that I forgive the silence of falling asleep
and waking up to oversight. That even I,
to all intents and purposes, a woman
deemed pleasant will forget to mend,
to pick up, to clean off. Remember that
some time it will be the last time that an offhand
remark gets swallowed without bread, gets pushed
to the side of the bottom
of memory. Remember that some time it will
be the last time I react and the first time
I am not moved to tears. You don’t know when
that last question, that last moment
of interest will move through me. And so,
say you don’t push your luck. Say,
you should remember that some time it might
be it will be

Women who hoard: an inventory / Cathy Ferrell

(with a line from Miriam Calleja Shaw’s Pockets)

one button with two holes
one sticky candy wrapper
hand sanitizer, empty
pocket lint
old thread
the embarrassing thing said 20 years ago
a barrage of cliff-edged words
the forgotten phone call
advice from your grandmother
unopened dreams
the quickest comeback, two seconds too late
a cork
one ace, an unrolled sleeve

Degrees of Pain: A Haiku sequence / Clyde Long

fall leaves blush in color
calendar a grave reminder
next year death at home

ancient hates hug death
clouds of souls ascend en masse
dampened dirt weeps blood

Another Thanks / Cecille Marcato

after Katie Marya

Dear, oh God, your names escape me, as I’m sure everything about me does you. That’s if you are even still alive. I’m writing just in case I failed to thank you for the sheets you gave Tom and me – yes, the sheets you bought in China when you were ambassadors or missionaries or something. I honestly can’t remember what in the world you were doing over there. Missionaries doesn’t feel quite right but then again you were good friends with my then mother- and father-in-law, who were staunch Lutherans and would have befriended you on that basis alone. Maybe it was trade-related. Nixon had opened economic relations with China, so maybe people went there just to buy things. As I said, I don’t remember. I envied them their faith, my in-laws. Christmas week, it seemed we were always in church. They cut down their own tree and decorated it with real candles just like in Sweden and Germany where they were from, respectively. On Christmas morning, after church, of course, they lit them and held the curtains back so that the entire house didn’t go up. It was horrifying. The sheets, though, were the stark white of a nurse’s cap in the olden days and a bit stiff, as this was before people in Egypt began counting threads – a truly baffling standard for cotton that makes about as much sense as saying that a piece of paper is twenty-four pounds. They had pale turquoise flower appliqués, like bluish cherry blossoms, on the top sheet and the edges of the pillowcases. They were stunning. We (I) felt unworthy. I’m here to tell you that they did not end up in the garage sale I had when the marriage dissolved and we moved to different parts of the City (a whole other story), as did almost all the other wedding gifts; and, although I retained custody of them, I have never once put them on a bed. Do you see what I’m saying? I never slept on your thoughtful gift. This goes for Tom as well. They might even have hard edges where they have been folded all these decades. These sheets not once graced a guest bed, even as decoration, which they could well have been, so delicate was their beauty. Maybe everyone in the world is too flawed to sleep in such personal luxury. Maybe it’s just me. My mother said that it is important to use wedding sheets and towels or else the fabric will rot. Wouldn’t that be the least of your problems in a new union? In any case, I have never had much truck with religious missions. Live and let live, you know? The same goes for marriage. But divorce? That’s serious business.

Cento with Lines from Husserl, Hermès, & Marx’s Das Kapital / Lizzy Polishan

A dolphin joins a banana,

a billiard ball floats

towards a rocket. We decompose

them into triangles. Phantasy turns

out here in a peculiar way to be productive:

There is created, on the one hand,

a constantly extending market for

gold & silver, &, on the other hand, unlimited

emotion & the unique

expression of a personal narrative

waiting to be written. We should, in this way,

get £1,500 on one side & £1,590 on the other.

Surprise, surprise!

MATTER / Gordon Taylor

Thoughts are birds.

Death is the absence

of thoughts.

Therefore, the absence

of birds

is death.

Day 17 / Poem 17

Driftwood/ David Burrows

a big wave came

like a cane

and yanked my piano

from its living

room stage

into the ocean

and now I crank

a music box

and feed a small monkey

and practice

for when the tide is low

how to fly

circles

like a seagull

to find my driftwood

and its keys

Pockets / Miriam Calleja

Inside, she is e x a g e r a t e d :

a stage whisper. She looks like she might
be on top of things
but acts like she’s

snowed under.

Earlier, a barrage of cliff-edged
words tumbled out of every pocket.
To think she used to love
garments with pockets.

Now, every possible storage space
                                                         can contain a problem
                                                         hers
                                                         to solve.

Women who ring / Cathy Ferrell

(in response to Miriam Calleja Shaw’s Percussion)

around the rosie, pocket full of posies. We ashes. We fall down. We call. We shoot the shit. We gab, we idle. We encircle fourth finger in promises, show pale underneath when they break. We leave film of suds around tub after scalding bath. We spirograph, we core. We are one ancient tree. We spin years. We loop. We prehistoric. We crop circle. We rock and ice around Saturn. We enigma. Don’t try to understand our circus. We are masters of the show. We tame lions, walk tightropes. We box, we spar. We win. We knit. We chemistry. We chain. We benzene ring. We make you forget. We toxic, we poison, we steal, we shake. We protect. We contain. We lead. We d o m i n a t e. We outwit. We peal. We sing sing sing sing sing

Beyond lifetimes / Clyde Long

-of W.S. Merwin, “Place”

My place in Calistoga, Napa Valley came with a pair of century old Canary Island palm trees framing the front yard, fifty feet tall. I instantly became a tree collector, like hitting a triple first time at bat. Trees growing beyond lifetimes. Rains of summer dates. Looming with dozens of widow-maker fronds loosed in wind storms. Homes to squirrels and woodpeckers. Monuments to life itself full of the dead – tenuous and grand.

clouds of falling fronds
on the last day of the world
leaves are tears let go.

Rapunzel’s Mother Is Finally Asked a Question / Cecille Marcato

We still live next door so, yes, we hear
her songs. They travel cloudward then
refract down to me. She gets her voice
from her father’s side, not mine.

Each day at three the tower casts
its shadow across our garden, darkening
the herb after which she was first named.
I don’t need to see the tenebrous earth
to know the darkness. It is a sword
that stabs me through my belly
where once she lived uneasily, churning
my guts, storming my blood, swelling.

Especially when it’s warm
I hear her every note – each word
crystal – & search for something
meant just for me, but so much time
has passed we no longer know
each other: She is pulsing
ache instead of daughter.
They say you cannot feel
your heart but that simply
is not true.

**After the bird in Kateryna Bilokur’s Flowers at Night – 1942** / Lizzy Polishan

It smells like petrichor & everything is
Dripping. The flowers are colored
Buttons holding closed the night.
The night is not a coat. I never learned
To sew. I have only my beak my fourteen
Feathers. If I could sew I’d clean all
The berries off this vine & use the naked
Green thread to stitch this petrichor
To this night. This garden. The earth
Grew a green nest, where amethyst
Cups of dewlight & moondrops live. I did not
Know the earth is also a bird. The striped
Petals are so pretty I could lick them.
A cricket stands on fallen rubies. The cricket
Is my friend. The sad song he plays is
The color of tomatoes. The lilacs are so
Pretty I want them on my head. The night
Smells like lilacs & I forgot where they are.

TREE HOUSE / Khamil Riley

May the leaves from my tree that still shake and tremble
        fall as silently as the boy who once said he loved me.
May they land hopelessly and aimlessly scattered at his feet
        as he walks hand in hand with someone who makes him feel better
Maybe someone who doesn’t.
May those trampled leaves get caked on the bottom of his feet as he walks.
        May he take a piece of me with him.
May it remind him of the places he’s been
        the home he found within my branches
        a comfort deep within my roots.
May he find those traces of me stuck beneath his shoe not so easily removed.
        or maybe he just gets a new pair.
Maybe he’s made a habit of turning girls into homes
        and my tree house just wasn’t the right fit
                         May he leave me behind then.
                     Maybe he leaves me behind then.

STONE FRUIT / Gordon Taylor

My younger lover sits with me

in jeans and orange hoodie

at our kitchen counter.

When I was a boy, orange

was my favourite color.

Can the cluster

of rotting cherries

wearing a skin of flies

in the silver wire mesh bowl

effuse its own sweet

flavor? Should I retire

from drink in this middle

middle age? The answer:

juice. I don’t mean sex.

Or I do. I’m searching

for another word

to contain both lust and envy.

Maybe, rain. Sweat

not mixed with lotion.

Faint mist in his hair.

Stride, not swagger

but a lack of history.

I can say I’ve been young

and old. Both have stones

and flesh. Power

failure. Clouds crouch.

Purple lightning cuts fog.

On the back lawn, our legs

overlap as we lie together

generating our own heat

and light. Afterglow—

for supper, I toss a mandarin

and raisin salad.

Day 16 / Poem 16

for Rumi/ David Burrows

I am a flute

a reed torn

from the cane bed

split off

wailing

scraped with a thousand

winds

plaintive

longing for return

to the grove of reeds

where the earth played

notes through us

like a set of pipes

a music of the spheres

Percussion / Miriam Calleja

A response to Cathy Ferrell’s Women who self-regulate

Women who self-regulate / Cathy Ferrell

(a response to Miriam Calleja Shaw’s Baking soda, white vinegar)

How do you descend
into your body? I seek
a place to ground.

The dishes are clean, now.

Nothing left to wipe away but
my own
storm look
how I surge
tempestuous. I rainband, I cloud.
Skin is eyewall, gust and wave.

Kitchen faucet flows to river. Push

inward to eye

temporary calm

You say, this is how we resume:
Stretch from center
Grip the earth
Sink heel into soil

Corgi life with Calico / Clyde Long

-for Claudia

She’s taking up the sofa
sleeping as usual so I
have to rest on the floor,
safe away from her claws.

Oh, when the humans come by
she wakes up and meows,
then they stroke her and purr
“Kitty cat” and rub her cheeks.

Sure, I roll over so adorable
and get tummy rubs as their
“Cutie pie” – they can’t rub her
tummy without lacerations.

The cat pan rules are complex.
They clean it out all the time,
but if I perform that fun chore
on my own I get in trouble.

I’m a good girl for always eating
meals quickly, right away.
If I gobble up her food that fast
it’s yet more trouble for me.

I have to admit to envy when she
jumps on the dinner table. If I could
do that, I’d eat every crumb, not nudge
plates and spoons onto the floor.

All and all, maybe she does liven
things up a bit around here.
She keeps me busy chasing her –
but I don’t ever dare catch her.

Top Notch Burgers Ghazal / Cecille Marcato

This restaurant is a time machine
where then & now seem virtually the same,

an old diner from fifty years ago
molded seats, ceiling tiles, the same

brick walls inside, bought as “used” as was the style
brown, beige, red, black, not all the same;

knotty pine on some walls & pendant lights unmatched;
a photo booth with strips of folks – the same & not the same.

Babes in shorts & skates took food to cars before, now
guys rush in & out: Times change, the staff is not the same.

The fare could be “A Study in Brown.” A sign says You Might
Die Tomorrow. (Eat what you want, it’s all the same?)

Top Notch means unsurpassed, first-rate, or aces;
crackerjack, dynamite & fab – similar, yet not the same.

Top Notch Fine Food Fast Service the logo sign proclaims
Cecille, if this place feels different it’s because it’s still the same.

dhgate time machine / Lizzy Polishan

the good news is i did order the time machine ||
the bad news is it’s been en route for two

years & possibly
does not exist || every day the seller

dm’s me
new tracking info || every day the seller is

a purple emoji shrugging empty-handed & certain
the time machine will arrive

tomorrow || the tracking website always says
that package does not exist || the time machine does not know

its own location || the time machine is
a time machine, therefore the time machine does not think, therefore

the time machine does not know if it is || maybe it is not ||
one possibility is that the time machine is a hypothetical ||

a different possibility is that the time machine did exist & at some point lost
its way or its body

was destroyed || i’ve forgotten what
i wanted to change || tomorrow

i will dm the seller || the message i will send will say
hi, my friend, i’m sorry, i need

to cancel this order || too many
things have happened for example

i have fallen in love with
the hummingbird who swirls through the pearly air & drinks red

sugar water at my window every evening at twilight while the sun bites into
the mountains & makes of the light a bilabial

lipsticked siren red || i have also fallen in love with
the holly

leaf cat who pads every morning out
of the bush

to drink water from the roof who has a small heart
on her front paw in her coppery

fur coruscating in the sun || also i bought
a record player & eight joan

baez records || i originally imagined if i listened to the records long enough
laying down on the floor looking up at the ceiling

the floor groaning under my shifting
weight the ceiling fan spinning on the ceiling then maybe

i would fall back in time || i only fell asleep || i learned
to cook 螺蛳粉, to be called 老婆 || i can cancel this order in american

english or mandarin chinese || i am pressing several
irises inside a copy of being & time || they are gorgeous & i’m still waiting

for them to fully dry || i would love
a refund if possible yes || yes i will give you 5 stars ||

Lamentation for Blue / Gordon Taylor

Ice fields recede like memories of my father

shovelling the drive. Lost

Polar Bears drown in their own neighbourhood.

My father says come home. I travel

to his ocean cathedral. He is an angel

flapping sea foam wings.

I travel back to a cradle of raveled turquoise

tinged snow. Ankles buckling, I dangle

from the right arm of his navy coat, hauled

up from a scratched, dusted

rink before I crash. He steals the bliss

of starting over.

His yell, tongueless

when I slip

out of time.

Sidewalks are slick with February

sleet.. Winter and spring blended.

He’s a photograph on a shelf.

I slow skate on stockinged feet into a room

that holds a mattress and an armless

blinking clock. O father. O rising

tide. We are water. We are of blue.

We are melting

into each other. There are more

and more waves, boiling

white and dark aqua. There are more

and more of us

orphans looking for a home.

Day 15 / Poem 15

poems/ David Burrows

poems are my gods

they heal

in a rush of power

a hush of breath

they never lie

in their visions

Baking soda, white vinegar / Miriam Calleja

After Women who clean slates by Cathy Ferrell

I wake next to the river
stumbling through weekdays—
time taken from me—time I inadvertently
gave away. The water is cold
enough to accelerate this stop-motion. Or
cold enough to pause, rewind.

At the kitchen sink, I sink
my frustration into baking soda,
mixed with salt, some water, Dawn—
I am now inventing the remedy—
but circular brush strokes are pleasant
and help me bite my tongue.
It sinks in.

I lay my wooden board on its side.
Under my instruction, it waits for tomorrow’s sun,
the dawn of a new cleanse
a slate wiped clean.
Back at the river, I descend into my body.
Resume.

Women who clean slates / Cathy Ferrell

We wake to dirty kitchens . Before
sun and laptops brighten,
we suds, we sinkful . Workday
starts before workday . Wipe
clean streak into
stew and last night’s .
What would it be like to wake with sparkling
thoughts before the first taste of ?
We wield sponges like
antidepressants. The skin on our
knuckles cracks from so
much
.

kitchens
laptops
sinkful
workday
beef
conversation
with
coffee
w i e l d

The

Dawn

Tilled journeys / Clyde Long

Within the endless rows ahead
who cares about straight lines?

We trudge as they guide us,
we chant in rhythm with saved words.

During muddy days boots have weight;
on sunny days we shuffle through dust.

Rows and rows become an infinity –
nightly we count galaxies of stars.

We lie upon tilled soil as our eyes
glaze trance-like until at last

we rest into sleep, hoping dreams
can heal us by sunrise.

My Country ‘Tis of Thee / Cecille Marcato

Someone had to be the Sun.
In this case it was of course
the mother, not because of her
luminosity or the heat that light
might engender, but rather a factor
of her psychic gravitational pull out-
pacing all neighboring celestial bodies
so much so that they all fell into orbit around
her.  Someone else, then, needed to be the Earth
and for this marbleized mass we had a father who
had his own gravity and therefore his own orbiting body,
a silver moon that stole the Sun’s own light and shone by night
as though lit from within.  Progeny. Yes, other planets trundled by
but were deemed by the Sun inconsequential.  Even now
there are those who oppose this heliocentric theory yet
it can be doubly verified by (1) peering into any tubal
devise with a parabolic mirror or (2) simply looking
up into the sky – day or night.  Who would think
to oppose a theory that can be corroborated
so easily?  Who basks in misinformation
televised daily while refusing to look
through a telescope or even
lift his chin to the sky?

after || birth / Lizzy Polishan

in the hospital
room the bed

side table holds
a rainbow mango

a radio playing
harry styles’ golden
on station 108

vapor floating
in an un
-opened mason jar

a copy of

plato & a bowl of sacred
rocks/ash a volcano
borrowed from an ancient

god

Wax Without Wane / Khamil Riley

There’s something about having my whole me out on the table that makes me feel more myself than I have in ages.
The comfortable silence. The warmth
of the wax. The sting left behind
when it’s over.
There’s something so lifelike
about the pain.
You can’t prepare for this.
Just gotta take it
as it comes.
Something much bigger than both she and
I orchestrated this moment.
Ordained it and made it so.
This lesson,
I hope I won’t let go

SURRENDER AT THE ARRIVAL GATE / Gordon Taylor

Two tilted triolets

My tilted brain is on a diet

of temazepam, tofu and talk

therapy. Welcome home, babe.

This tilted brain on a diet

of twice baked sweet potato

and limp broccoli craves

a trashy, tilted snack.

Cake tossed in the trash.

Black forest in hot August.

We glide on airport movators.

We melt seduction in the trash.

I need to bury my face in cake

lick your tart cherry icing

sift through our trash.

Day 14 / Poem 14

muse/ David Burrows

the daemon returns
pulls fingers to keyboard
murmurs of light
and the dark
nocturne

she speaks her restless
mind
and fluttering heart
she is a still lake
moving by flat rocks
thrown, skimmed
by young boys
across her
make widening
circles
to infinity

from her womb
she expells
bones
fossils
shells
a few pearls

Too good of a girl / Miriam Calleja

After Women who dissolve by Cathy Ferrell and with a quote by Thoreau

Please understand.
If you suffocate these things for long enough,

nothing really hurts.
– Dean Rhetoric

Will you know it when you see it?
It is me
I am the one
who has become detached¹
from the upper right corner of sight.
Detached²
is the heart that roams,
that does not sit in its designated cave.
Darkness may sound like a welcome friend
but only if you have friends
that help you see the light.

¹I see you hurryscatter
compromise my pace

²The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it

Women who discoball / Cathy Ferrell

(with inspiration from Miraim Calleja Shaw and Taylor Swift)

It’s not like it was in ballet class–long limbs and controlled centers. It’s not like that at all. We shoot beams from our eyes and out our fingertips. Have you seen the way we shimmy? We rotate on the floor and light scatters. Glitter everywhere. We don’t even mind that we’ll be picking it out of the dryer for weeks to come. This is our time. At least until we open our eyes, or another email pings Urgent Urgent Now Now Now is our time.

People with detached
retinas see
floaters. They are their own
private discotheques. Tell me, do you
hear the bass? Or is it just
tinnitus? Or is it just
getting old? Ring on
the bell bottoms, the paisley prints.

Refract: to make waves; to change direction

Won’t you dissolve with me?
We can make this whole place shimmer.

Hands / Dralandra Larkins

You are holding me as I lay in your hands
You chose to take breath out of my lungs with your kiss.
The last time our lips met
Our tshirts clung to the sweat on our skin. Selfishly.
We both dived deep in one another natural.
Receiving one another
In each other
Hands.

Cartoon Hobo Bag / Clyde Long

A young lifetime of TV cartoons,
Disney and Tex Avery Saturdays

with Mom and Dad busy with chores,
uncensored cartoons for brothers and me –

they’re only cartoons, stuff for kids
so we gorged on these all morning.

At first we had to imagine color TV, but
‘toons themselves were colorized by us.

By age 6, before Dad passed away, I
as a difficult kid became disenchanted

by kindergarten and always in trouble
with Mom about fighting with my brothers.

Came to the point I decided to run away,
let them try to get by without oldest son!

I found an old broom stick and Mom’s
bandana, filled it with what I needed –

my teddy bear, a pen knife from Granddaddy,
two apples, and some of Dad’s paper money.

I disappeared down the street ready
for my new footloose life as a hobo,

my hobo bag swinging off my shoulder,
a young man free of teachers and family.

After a while under a shade tree I sat
eating my apple and counting Dad’s money.

My bear looked at me and I looked back —
we didn’t know where to go except home.

I tossed the apple core into the weeds and
tied up the hobo bag; maybe bear and I
weren’t cut out for a hobo’s life.

Back home I put Dad’s money away —
and turned on the TV.

Untitled / Cecille Marcato

Let us speak delicately

the way a robot peels

a grape, then sutures it

as though nothing profound

had happened, as though

everything were not all

of a sudden

different but none

the worse & if it is

there is a balm

or ice & the human

touch & time.

@men / Lizzy Polishan

i wrote you a poem & everyone is an apple
tree in the poem i wrote :: the black kitten fell

asleep in the open book you’d been reading
me aloud :: the other kitten sat on your shoulder

in the shadow on the stucco wall :: my shadow
on the sand seemed to wear the black bikini

i just flattened there to dry :: when it got dark
i turned & stretched as if to cup the full moon ::

you took a photo of my hair down my back &
we can crop my legs out later :: when the fire

alive in this limestone cave keels & the smoke
rolls out over the ocean :: last week we buried

our dead friend in a rainstorm :: we left the church
under the same umbrella & a million leaves like

a million tiny copper clovers stuck to the wet dark
pavement stuck to slick black soles of your shoes.

God’s Favorite / Khamil Riley

I have been tired

Depressed

Slow and low down

Sick

Grand

And all over town

I’ve been up

I’ve been fucked

Been stuck and

out of luck but

Somehow

God never seems to forget me.

ARC PART TWO / Gordon Taylor

it can take decades

for perspective

for example, my mother

has taken fifty years to admit

anger at gramps for driving

the car that killed gran

I’ve been brewing

lemonade but there are leftover

lemons is that joy

or is bliss MMMBop

playing in earbuds

as rain needles my head

most days i think paddling

anus faced tardigrades

are the earth’s future

growing up in the eighties

we thought apocalypse

would be quick

something nuclear

a hot fingered dictator

poison in the sleet

a bug in the fruit

but extinction is slow

as a comet poems travel

and arrive at divine speed

my tongue purples from biting words

growing up i thought god

wouldn’t approve of me

i named my daughter after Christ

i don’t have a daughter

i was taught queer people were too toxic

to reproduce themselves

my friend Colin who is both

Erato and Calliope

insists everything has happened before

in architecture

all modern doorways are Stonehenge

post lintel and plastic

arcs still arc and atria

are steel spider webs above us

there are centuries of poems

reinventing moons and faith

is like chasing a breath

and learning is kindling

another fire on Jupiter’s moon

and by fire I mean I’m worried

poetry can’t heal us

Day 13 / Poem 13

untitled/ David Burrows

I call, a bird in spring
on the wind
day after day
till my voice cracks

Is this the wrong note
to play the chord
of your ruby breast,
beloved?

The stone floor glows
from me on my knees
with a scrub brush

Pachouli burns
in the bedroom
the scent of cinnamon
rolls fill the kitchen
roses swell from vases

still no glimpse
of the one
for whom I carry
this song

Balanceworn / Miriam Calleja

I am mousespeak
sugarspit
I am ragedissolved
the aftermath
I’ve rolled down a hill
unarmed
I am gritteeth
tonguetight
balanceworn

I fight breakspeed
cementstop
chew it with my glass tongue

I discoball my sight
into feetdissolve
I am far
I am made of only head

Women who dissolve / Cathy Ferrell

I walk through the mall with my friend

“Your fingers” she says “are purple”

My head the ceiling My chin

Lowers

look through microscope

My tiny friend

My tiny hands f l o a t

the ends of my arms Where are my toes?

Invisible anchor belly heavy floor

All I can see a blur a buzz my cheeks numb ringing

I do not even try to keep it together.

Surprise rain surprises seeds! / Clyde Long

Weatherman called for sun, not rain.
By surprise today we got rain.

My freshly detailed car is spotted —
weather guy has lots to explain.

Two dogs ran through the mud playing;
here inside their mess is insane.

Surprised seeds will begin to sprout,
Fall leaves blushing red to be seen.

Tomorrow’s weather will be sunny,
who knows if puddles will remain?

My guess is as good as anyone’s –
don’t trust the weatherman or Clyde.

An Illness Graphed / Cecille Marcato

I began to plot you
convex to concave
& back again
& back again.

Above your own tangent
you were green & below
blue; red
at the inflection point
when we called in specialists.

They made a new graph
with you as the asymptote,
me as the curve. Our distances
approached zero, but our points
never converged
& this attempt, while never
hopeful, seemed accurate.

Drive-Thru / Lizzy Polishan

I was waiting for you to get married so I could get married next The line to get married was very long and in the McDonald’s drive-through Up ahead a teenager in a red visor hung out of Order Window #2 She smiled and waved We smiled and waved Many cars idled between us It was 3 AM I was driving and you were unwrapping your presents Everything felt pink and looked like cake Your dress was black velvet to the floor I touched my hair, which was hard and smelled like Garnier Fructis My hair pricked my fingers Where did you get that tiara you said It must have been the Happy Meal Toy I was being crushed under the weight of my enormous white dress I felt like I was trapped inside a bell I feel like I’m trapped inside a bell I said The mascara that ran down your cheeks dripped on the gifts in your lap I reached inside the tissue-box and pulled out a cream-colored rose You said when we drive past the coffin drop that on her head

Held Breath / Khamil Riley

Wait wait, wait,

My restless legs only know run.

Bound by elastic,
they’re expanding enough
to just not make it.

I am being told to wait.

To sit and let
the universe do its work.
Which is something much harder
Than it seems.

It’s another day gone by
not being where you want to be.

Means knowing it’s out there
with a price to pay
and still being told you have to stay.

Scaling the walls of
this tunnel or abyss
I am clawing my way out

with bloodied fingertips.

Skinned thighs,

am shedding pieces
of myself along the walls
and they will still be here
as I move on.

I’ll grow new skin, and
learn to think it refreshing.
Let my new body
seep and tie its knots.
As I grow, each tug of these strings
Draws fresh breath into my lungs.

I am breathing.
Breathing.

And waiting.

For something
still yet unseen.

ARC PART 1 / Gordon Taylor

sunrise is the inside

of my hard boiled egg

matte white and yellow

the pale grey yolk edge

is the curved horizon

this morning a fold

of sheep matches baskets of apples

my crimson autumn

cable knit sweater and cream

merino wool slacks

I fell asleep alone

in this dormant orchard

under a tree picked bald

had a dream with a soundtrack

composed in an earlier dream

like a carried voice

sorry as a cold iron next

to a wrinkle-free polyester button down

tragic as locks with caretakers that lost

the codes or a body

without a mind

I thought could heal

if i forgot loneliness

if i found the word for air again

so this is my arc

i will learn

to love myself before I die

imagine a baby in a history

of babies discovering

their own toes

what a wonder!

what do these do?

someone change my diaper

feed me applesauce god

damnit what is god

a woman i know

said i don’t know

what your poems mean

nor do i

join the try to make sense club

and by butterfly my father

meant his fluttering heart

as he began forgetting songs

departing for a nameless heaven

and by butterfly he meant

one had flown into the kitchen

where he picked it up by the wings

when he let go

it fell dead to the tile

his hands dusted with orange

his mouth agape

do we kill what we mean to save

when i’m reincarnated

i’ll return smaller and less

vain a sparrow

landed on the tongue

of my shoe and looked up at me

i didn’t move

until her search was through

remember almost everything

is not human

personfication is rude

Day 12 / Poem 12

Nearer my Dog to me / David Burrows

nearer my dog to me, nearer to me

your tail wags merrily, nearer to me

nearer my dog to me, your kisses raise me

nearer my dog to me, nearer to me

I needn’t walk alone, you’re at me side

wherever I may roam, together we stride

nearer my dog to me

your kisses comfort me

nearer my dog to me, nearer to me

you bring your toys to fetch

time and again

and when my spirit’s low

make my heart to glow

nearer…

and when the path grows dim

you shine a light

to guide and heal me

through the dark night

nearer my dog to me

your kisses comfort me

nearer my…

your smile brings joy to me

day after day

you love me faithfully

unconditionally

nearer my dog…

you greet me every morn

bright as the sun

you are my ever friend, we are one

nearer my dog to me…

whene’er my journey’s done

and I lie down, you’ll lay beside me

as I seek life’s crown

across the rainbow bridge

we shall walk again

there in the happy land, nearer to me

Best Actress / Miriam Calleja

After Women who lie by Cathy Ferrell

She receives a trophy and sparkling accolades for her socialized performances. Glitzy glamor in her heels silver-golden that rub, crack. Blisters on an exhausted line. She whips out her people-pleaser, only slightly bruising herself, only slightly scarring herself for life. The make up is wiped in one smooth movement, but somehow, the traces she leaves multiply during the night and don’t you know, waterproof doesn’t mean it can withstand everything she’s internalized. She’s a winner, a keeper, a go-getter, but she’d rather go to sleep. Tonight, for the grand prize, she has learned an entire speech. It is her night off, after all. Her lipstick is askew, her foundation a shade darker. As she walks up to collect this latest symbol of praise, her teeth rattle against the mic. One eyeball pops out. Her left breast becomes unhinged. There is an audible gasp as her lunch repeats on her straight into the front row, amplified. She laughs and it comes out a snort. Then she snorts and snorts and can’t stop herself from laughing, dropping the mic as she shakes. Then, in the last moment, as she leaves the stage, her catsuit gets caught in gaffer tape. Like a matador’s muleta in the final third of a bullfight, she is suddenly in the way of death. Standing tall, in granny panties, everyone can see the first genuine smile of her career.

The crowd goes wild.

Women who change / Cathy Ferrell

(inspired by Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, with a line from Miriam Calleja Shaw’s the ophthalmologist)

Peel away your old tight skin
and leave it where it falls.
Expose the underneath
It is fresh, raw
Alive Alive Alive

Listen! The wind:
There has been an explicable change

Size up, unashamed.
You are a modern-day Venus.
Unroll the belly.
The dressing room is your scallop.

Lately / Dralandra Larkins

It’s been hard not to miss you and want to kiss you
even when you leave, I can still feel you
smell you,
Mahogany Breeze, there’s so many things I wish to tell youLike When u kiss me
doubts of darkness began to fade
quicklytriggered by your kisses you plant them
gently
On palms and cheeks
legs wrapped tightly around your waist
Our bodies create
Sacred Geometry

January’s answer / Clyde Long

Seems like an answer
not a question, more like a
thought that maybe the dusty
Napa River won’t need to
handle winter storms this year:
A dry October’s fear.

Hopes are for a December
baptismal storm cleansing
dry riverbeds with fresh flows
all into a chorus of roars,
currents deep dark and cold;
a river reborn dangerous.

Baptism arrives early January.
Deluges revive her cold dangers.
Bystanders peer warily over
the eroded river banks. Her moon
and planet cousins above jeer,
“careful now, we told you so”.

A Letter to T____ on Deaccessioning / Cecille Marcato

T____, I think I am beginning to understand your choice.
Last spring my cat died & I had to move.
These two events were unrelated.  Or maybe not.
A sympathetic friend, an astrologer, warned me
that I would have to reckon with, as she put it, my material culture.
Did I lose you by mentioning her profession?
While begging pardon I remind that before your religion evolved
the Tetrabiblos enjoyed a long season.
Maybe he, Ptolemy, as an early, influential music theorist
teases your interest or (dare I say?) garners your respect.
There is room, surely, for us all.

Maybe choice is not the right word.
Something involuntary like a heartbeat or a secular cosmic force
like gravity – yes, that strong – moved you.

A numinous voice that speaks directly to a human heart
bypassing the little factory that is our brain;
not bothering with ears &, in your case, circumventing
those gifted hands that might have argued their case
solely by being lifted to the keys of your Pleyel.

You would call it God, this whispering force. I mean that as a question.
You would say (&, again, pardon an assumption)
that He is not the thought behind the music or a conductor
of hands on keys but is, in fact, Himself the music.

A congregation of starlings moves in time
with Mozart’s piano concerto No. 21 in C Major,
the whole of it without hearing a note.
This I observed first-hand.
Who is behind such an event? I might ask.
I envy you your belief.
Your simple desk with its three books.
Your heatless hut.
My path is strewn with topographic maps,
family photographs & those of people I don’t even know;
blocked by boxes of books on – name the subject.
Inheritance.  Shackles.  I understand this.
I am moving toward you, T____,
with so little time to arrive at your door.

SICK SAM / Khamil Riley

Bleeding seedling.
Sick sonic.
Ten toes touch down.
Sick Sam, Sam slick
and lick the back
of my kneecaps. He’ll
tell me I taste lovely,
Like my grandmother before me.

Sick screaming at Cynic Sam,
“Take me to the clinic!”
Sick Sam says he’d die before
He’d ever touch me

Safe to say Slick Sam Sank
He fell stiff
Sold his soul for a dance
With mortality
I’d say we ladies

are all glad he’s dead.

ANNA / Gordon Taylor

Palindrome girl, let me write the soundtrack for the afternoon
you were named, sweet

infinity. The wind hummed carry on
over crackling cries of grounded maple

leaves, a storm’s carrion, voices carrying. A poet said
start in the middle. Beginning and ending—

the most difficult. I can’t remember
how fearlessnes feels. A glass

bangle can crack. A lung can turn
grey. My oncologist said immune systems

never forget. Cancer—a quiver
of questions. Where have you been?

When will you go? How
will you look? I have nothing

to teach, but your eyes in the baptismal
photo are clear of accumulation—

your face, backward due to refractions of light
bouncing from origin to reflection. Anna—

even your name—the same
from back to front— will change

shape like a shadow growing
long as morning shifts into noon.

Day 11 / Poem 11

filling me up with light / David Burrows

he smiled right to me
said hi
warmed me
which on the metro
was very unusual
for anyone not to be
stonefaced
or into their phone
or inscrutable
me, him, the lady
next to me
formed a circle
of care
gazed twinkling
at his two year old
daughter
listening to her babble
in her stroller
on the green line
to Greenbelt
he was slight of build
simply dressed
with brown red
dreadlocks
and freckles

there with a brood
of four children
we all communed
from Navy Yard
to Columbine Heights
the kids telling us
their ages
each in turn
four, two,
eight, six

we stood to exit
waiting for
the grey doors
to open
I motioned for him
and his family
to go first
before me
he surprised
me again
filling me up
with a fist bump
and a “be safe”
a goodbye
I hadn’t heard before
till the next night
from a bartender
at the Purple Patch
who said it again
a mantra of the city

the ophthalmologist / Miriam Calleja

spies on my little eye
after I’d insisted something’s wrong
I just don’t have the vocabulary for what’s missing
He negates as he is accustomed to do
with women. There has been an explicable
change and what’s to come
will draw a line before and after
my insistence echoes familiar
I’m afraid it is bad news

He says this as though I hadn’t said, hadn’t known, hadn’t thought of it myself.

the dictum delivered – a stitch in time – saves nine ———
the wisdom of knowing gains a voice
I go to my mother to cry
afraid to sneeze afraid
of the actual stitch

Women who lie / Cathy Ferrell

To be negated is to feel

a tingle in the fingertips
a splotch of red on the cheek, then leech

Colorless

            the billow of a shroud whooshed white and high
            a settling of dust on the crown of the head
            a stuffing of the mouth with cotton
            a throat choked on its own saliva

Swallowed words

Glazed eyes

Best Actress

They say: Be good, be quiet. Nod. Always, always admit to their mistakes. Look down, because

pupils cannot lie when they dilate wide.
Ours can shape galaxies
hungry enough to eat their egos whole.

untitled / Dralandra Larkins

U been giving out parts of your hearts that were always meant to be yours
U been feeling incomplete forcing yourself in locked doors
You ought to let go and god take the wheel
And i know it aint easy but just sit back and see whats reveal
See how your healed
See how God shows u how whats fake and whats real
From the inside out
Sometimes u got to stop to take a good look to know what ur really about
U cant keep running from your fears
You can keep seeking validation from your peers
And be surprised when inauthenticity appears
Its time to face your flaws.
Its time to go out and face it all

Our house / Clyde Long

Ours is a tidy old house
full of shedding pets
who lavish fur and love.

Ours is not a lonely house
yet harbors years of losses
always with their weight.

It’s a busy house filled with
many dreams and needs,
assuming many more years.

Windows filter light through
old glass window panes,
frames giving loose hugs.

Its vintage voice asks us,
“how long will you live here,
you mere doomed humans?”

We are blissfully defiant,
we repair and exercise
answering certain doom.

Cairn Pantoum / Cecille Marcato

& now your voice, rich, deep – a hint of gravel
an embrace like smoke, blue & grey, wafting;
one stone in a cairn assembled from scree
a guide for Memory on her to-&-fro way

an embrace like smoke, blue & grey, wafting
the scent of civet from apothecary jars
musk guide for Memory on her to-&-fro way
shards of a dream or fully formed in the room.

The scent of civet from pharmacy jars
saved for years, olfactory time machine
a shard, a dream, or fully formed in the room
blocking the trail to high Delicate Arch.

Saved for years, olfactory time machine
to be opened at will but not without risk;
blocking my trail to the high, delicate arch:
my cairns more elusive, the longer the hike.

To be turned at will but not without risk
one stone in a cairn assembled from scree;
the longer I live, the more hidden my cairns
but now your voice – deep & rich, a hint of gravel.

Palimpsest (or, Infinite Regression) / Lizzy Polishan

The¹ black²cat³was⁴chasing⁵her⁶shadow⁷down⁸the⁹hall¹⁰.

¹Suppose this is the first time you are seeing the cat.
²Suppose the cat is white.
³Suppose the cat* is not a cat.
⁴Suppose that before she was not a cat, the cat did begin chasing her shadow.
⁵If the chasing that started when she was a cat continues and she is not a cat, is the chasing still
going on?
⁶As the cat transforms, does the shadow transforming on the threadbare rug continue belonging
to her?
⁷Suppose she is able to catch the shadow.
⁸Suppose she is pinning it down.
⁹Do you know who owns this hallway, if you have forgotten all your French and can’t remember
any part of her name?
¹⁰Actually, the hallway goes on forever, but only in one direction.

*Suppose the cat is a pygmy hippo / a beam of moonlight / the possibility of a cat / a
shadow running down a hall

DANGER / Khamil Riley

I am not cut out for this life
so full of sorrow and goodbye.
I prayed this lemon sweeter
Than I knew it could be,
then still felt threatened by the rapture.
I’ll take matters into my own hands
killing myself with every breath I don’t take
And every drink that I do.
And oh,
I do
Take this bottle, to have and to hold
Until death or new dreams drive us apart.
Somewhere, my body screams
in objection, but I haven’t got the heart yet
to unfold that there will be no better
That comes from this union.
Only a journey half-ass embarked upon
Where we, my body and me,
Begin spiraling.
Deeper into a darker abyss
Who knows if it gets any better than this…

STRANGER / Gordon Taylor

The argument was wood

stain for bedside tables.

I’ve given myself away

to you. That’s love

you argued. I left

the hardware store, powered

through thick, oatmeal air

Linden ammonia scent

blooming in Ramsden Park.

You drove back to find me

sweating on our front steps.

I forgot my key.

I never spoke

of the familiar stranger

who skinned my boyhood

body, making love impossible

to believe. In our bedroom

next to the cracked marble fireplace

I whispered my hunger

for waves cresting on packed sand

under a rotting pier

for a stranger’s fresh musk

in my beard, the wet

of his legs.

To know a landscape

you must know yourself

you said, quoting a yogi.

Suddenly, we weren’t in love.

We split plastic from paper

sorted salad scraps

for compost, wheeled

thundering garbage bins to curb.

I shaved my head, groomed

a man I’d want. Antonyms

fell from my scalp.

You tried to wipe the sun

smear from the top

of our walnut cabinet.

Just a patch of noon.

Nature never needs fury

to rearrange us.

We livestream the morning

aftermath of a hurricane.

A grandfather confused

by his own neighborhood—

betrayed by tide, was swept

to sea with his wisdom

as he wandered

in the sideways rain.

A turquoise house perched

on a cliff’s edge that withstood

the sea’s temper for decades

crashed onto a teacup rock.

An echo of gold light

stuttered from your iris

to puddle, an inflection point

on our gleaming

driveway blocked

by the corpse

of an uprooted tree.

Day 10 / Poem 10

untitled / David Burrows

I heard you as a boy on TV

the show Kung Fu

a bamboo flute

slow and meandering

like a stream

by a Shaolin monk

and my edges redefined

my body was your body

the sound was me

and when I pressed my lips

to your opening

it was religious

a link back to the ocean

I played and the children

followed us home

Facta non verba / Miriam Calleja

After a line by Cathy Ferrell

Time is sand that slips between fingers.
Parched, it doesn’t stick,
never hangs around.

They are lucky to have us, you know

Even though they don’t pick up hints
aren’t nudged by nudges

facta non verba, we stir fragrant food

embroider specific joy
onto the inside of as many smiles as we can

and when the needle stings
we beg for more.

Women who dare / Cathy Ferrell

(a response to Miriam Calleja Shaw’s On the shore)

What is a spectacle but
a lens? Look at us,

daring to
inhabit our own

space. They are lucky
to have us, you know.

Lucky to know our tame
and unruly.

Days roll in and out.
The sea swells like

our bellies. Mine spills
over swimsuit bottoms. One day

I will peel the whole thing off and run
into frigid water,

whooping
bare as joy.

Cotton / Dralandra Larkins

This morning,
I cried at work.
Waves of exhaustion
Hit me like a hurricane.
Clear liquid drown my
Keyboard. I was underpaid.
It was the first time
I felt like my ancestors.
Shacked by the wrist
in chains of capitalism.
Trapped in a White man’s
cage of patriarchy.

I left.
It was the first time
I met slavery;
kicked its guts with my
own fist of freedom!
Signed the certificate with divine blind faith
Took the underground to tranquility in a bliss
Of fields under the sun.

Importantly
It was the first time
I learned
the significance
of saving cotton.

Recent encounters in St. Helena / Clyde Long

Orange emeralds

A patient under the hands of a
physical therapist this afternoon –
I heard about Humboldt weed

and Thailand’s orange emeralds
and stood before tall mirrors,
upright straight like a soldier
at attention without salutes
or verbal abuse. Neck was next.

Chili and fries

A room full of chairs greets me.
I pluck a not-Covid pen to sign in.
Short time to wait with my phone.
They lead me to a surgery room.

Laid down with a pillow and blanket.
Lovely doctor with confident cheer.
She eyes me like an insect specimen
then pokes and cuts and stanches.

An hour later I am free to leave,
in a week or so to be good as new.
I flee to a lunch of chili and fries;
same day beer is verboten.

Upon the Teacher Forbidding the Class To Workshop Love Poems / Cecille Marcato

First day.  The teacher says
no poems about love, no exceptions.
A student reads,
the teacher shut him down.
That’s a love poem.  Next.
What about grief, I ask?  Grief, too,
he says. Grief is an abstraction.
No, I say, it’s open window with organdy
curtains flapping through; I say,
forty days in the desert
not even a mirage not even
a palm tree; X-ray blanket
at the dentist’s – unwieldy & hot
& carried around for the rest
of your life as in forever.
I say, it’s a subdural hematoma;
or a sudden drop in altitude,
your heart left aloft, the rest of you
falling. It is sitting with your hands
folded smelling rosemary & smiling
until you remember he is
not coming back; it is forcing your lungs
to expand & contract
for air too thick to swallow.
It’s grey. It’s beige.

The moonlight is peering down into the reeds. / Lizzy Polishan

¹The moon, who wears
hands like hospital
gloves, parts the green
reeds to find the green
seashell. ²The Moon
Would Now Like to Reel
in A Real Fish: ³The Light
Will Settle for Birdsong
on an Infinite B-Side
Loop ⁴The seashell
is a clamshell & asleep.
⁵Maybe a few feathers
from another century
appear. ⁶Maybe a cello
-phane butterfly lands
on an exhausted net:
forgotten among the bewildered
reeds, half-submerged in
the purple water, fraying
under a labyrinth of gnats.
⁷Under the algae, a smell
rises from the depths. Blue
flute music in the key of B
flat… ⁸The night is,
young enough to swallow.
⁹A curtain of hummingbirds opens
& a wedge of moonlight
is glazing the green water.
¹⁰The green clamshell sleeps
among the green reeds in
the tattoo on your left ankle.

HUNGER/ Khamil Riley

Hunger never leaves the belly for long.

Only masks it in thin acid lining,

making waste of everything it touches.

I’m saying I never learned

to make space for satisfaction.

Only incessant need

to fill my stomach

with something not quite there already.

Sometimes it feels like loneliness,

others like a body begging to meet

death by way of a steady fire

so as to finally bring meaning to this

Gasoline pit of a liver.

Of a body.

As the flames consume me,

I am reminded of when my mother said

to win in someone else’s game

is to lose in one’s own

So there is no glory in falling short here

In calling it quits

With a hunger,

I come crawling back

This time for life

I’ll claw my way back for 7 feet under

Facts About Survival / Gordon Taylor

I learned to disappear

as a teenager, jumped

from a rowboat

changed my mind about dying

and started toward a shore I could see but not reach

pausing to rest every few minutes, breathing

out into waves, legs peddling

under clear blue.

As a boy I dreamed in every new room

mama dragged me to, on a bed

of coats at a grown-up’s party, in the grass

under a lawn chair, locked out of the house

in a rainstorm, and while dressed in red pajamas

at the drive-in, lying on the vinyl back seat

of a long finned Chrysler

lulled by static from the tin movie speaker.

Mama named me after her favorite uncle.

When she was a girl, he walked her to seaside

whenever gran wanted her gone.

A late twenties “bachelor”,

he fed her chocolate ice cream, slipped

sand dollars into her pockets

explained the beach

was remnant of an ancient mountain range.

A chemistry lesson. A body’s musk

tinges a favorite suit at a funeral

long beyond a fatal mistake

or the quick stroke of a name.

I was six when mama’s uncle

vanished, cause of death, a secret. Each morning

she walked me to the water and taught me to swim

her hand resting on my belly as I kicked.

She smiled in her floral bikini and pink bathing cap

splash-splattered, tinted cat glasses

hiding bloodshot eyes.

I paddled in the shallows when she let go of my arms.

She waited in the dunes, holding open

a leopard print terry towel until I returned

running to her from the freezing waves

across miles of sun burned sand

shivering— drenched and alive.

Day 9 / Poem 9

Purple Shades / David Burrows

humming as a boy

every time I wore them

the pants with purple and grey stripes

the ones dad wanted to make sure

I really wanted

before buying them

waiting for whenever they make it

back out of the wash

to take their turn on the bathroom railings

in the rotation of shower towels

one a pink purple

the color of mulberry jam

the other a deep purple

of Chinese violets

pausing daily on the way to work

to take them in

the purple shades

of the concrete walls

of Don Juan restaurant

on Mt Pleasant St

On the shore / Miriam Calleja

After Cathy Ferrell’s Women who wade

I sit with thighs wide,
body splayed,
pearls s p (l) i t t i n g down my chin.

I am tired but must go on.

Not ladylike!

The crowds rush to seagull.
And I, widening,

taking up space,

no longer hide the spectacle.

A world that gets my best
must swallow every part of me,
every extra inch of word, unruly hair,
every thought that’s tight or loose.

A world that gets my best
must swallow my scream
my e v e r y scream

Women who wade / Cathy Ferrell

We walk far enough that
the water should cool, but the burn is
inside. Why have we pinned our lips?
Lower to upper, they seal
tighter than the seam of
an oyster’s shell.
Our silent steam cannot
escape. If it did,
the world would boil.
Small waves foam around
our thighs, circle our hips, curl into
our navels. You point out
an unspent sand dollar.
We breathe wide above the waterline,
backs to shore,
spit out pearls.

Untitled / Dralandra Larkins

How toxic is it for a society
to proclaim color determines
your sexuality.
Pink is the color of love and happiness.
I don’t find that to be sexually anonymous.
As if pink were for punks-
Pink for p***
Purple for the the boy who doesn’t find
breaking a womans heart as entertainment
In my culture,
real men can’t get caught with glitter only blood.
Theyre taught that red is for warriors

and not for love.
I couldn’t imagine, possibly fathom
That the world we live is a corporation.
some agencies can’t approve of your sexual preference
Yet local news acknowledge
That queer Black boys
exude sexual aggression.
They look over the rainbow
and forget about Black.
Did you know that 1 and 3 queer people want to die?
Did you know that 1 and 3 queer people will lose their lives ?
It isn’t pride it’s problematic.
Queer pride is celebrated through parade
And celebrating love is damn gay!

Maui lanai / Clyde Long

My first night in Maui after a long
flight across four time zones.
One of my favorite places, no matter
a little jet lag on the first night.
My cure is rum on the back lanai,
Hibiscus blooms surrounding me.

Above I heard sudden flutters
and saw its night time authors –
once a myna bird couple,
twice a yellow billed cattle egret.
Clucking and fussing below,
a Hawaiian chicken family.

A midnight fingernail moon
rose over the ocean’s lullaby,
punctuated by Reggae beats
from my insomniac lanai birds.
All I imagined was rest upon
their feathers, soft as a pillow.

Sanctuary / Taylor Mallay

We perched by the window
watching the rain disappear in fog.
When the storm passed,
we walked to the park together.
The grass shimmered.
Above us, wide oaks
spread their branches in protection,
their leaves shedding cool drops
on our shoulders, our mouths.
I offered my hand and you held it.
Somewhere in the distance—
the flutter of wings.

Haiku / Cecille Marcato

Haiku | i

Cat still life with stuff
My basket my table mine.
Rescue settles in.

Haiku | ii

Modern medicine –
ah, propofol: sudden sleep.
Robot goes to work.

You’re Here :: Charles Simic Starts Narrating / Lizzy Polishan

You are an astronaut :: You’ve been going home for a very long time :: It is dark & you are hitting every red light :: The highway is made of clear glass & the supermarket didn’t even have the kind of ice cream you like, which is Cherry Garcia :: A crystal spider dangles from your rearview mirror :: On the side of the highway there is a jungle gym & thirteen kids are pretending to be pirates in the dark :: The identical triplet girls climb on the tops of the slides :: The turtle-faced boy gets stuck inside the cold blue spiral & yells somebody help! :: You’re zooming :: You shift your foot but can’t hit the next light :: A deer is catching up to you & you don’t even have your insurance information :: On the passenger’s seat, you have three cucumbers, which you are going to make into soup

an ode to black herstory/ Khamil Riley

I write as a marker
that this black woman existed
in time and her existence
brought life into this world.
She breathed it into her poetry
and sang it aloud in her song.
I write so the archivist and the children
alike remember who really
set the pace
And set the tone
Don’t want no history made up
On white and unknowing tongues
About me
And what it meant to live and breathe
As the key
To this society’s being

Selfie With Mortality / Gordon Taylor

Imagine with me, the night

before my father died. I slept twelve hours

nearly dreamless in the guest suite. Just before I woke

I dreamed he changed

my name to his, with one variation. My middle

name remained The.

Imagine with me, a woman running

through the hospital lobby, the day my father

died, screaming

her hair was on fire. But her hair wasn’t on fire.

It was a metaphor the security guard refused

to entertain as he escorted her outside.

Imagine swapping the word recovery

with un-learning. When I was a closeted teen

I escaped to soap operas. In season six

of Knot’s Landing, Valene Ewing

had a nervous breakdown characterized

by temporary amnesia. Heaven.

She left her life behind

and became a waitress. I dreamed

I became a waitress and fell in love

with a man who lived on a cul de sac.

We huddled together after a tree fell

on our house in a storm. True

romance. Imagine joy

battling productivity. The pile of autumn

maple leaves gathered in an attempt to tidy

nature. The dog leaping head first

into the crimson gold, spring

trampolining from winter.

Imagine bouquets of lilies

of the valley with calming hints of lemon

almond and jasmine. Don’t eat the flowers

because they are poison

like the latency of all gifts, or the snake

oozing in the wet grass like paste from a tube.

Ask with me, if family or love evolves

from time and proximity, from a story

we weave as we talk to death

a god. In the late afternoon

sun, my dog and me have long shadow

matchstick legs. We belong together.

Without the Wizard of Oz

I can’t imagine cycling to the hospital

accompanied by the Wicked Witch of the West’s

sinister theme, and a stolen Toto in my basket.

Swirling hungry seagulls above

army of winged sock monkeys. Duck!

Without me, I’m nothing. Without my vocabulary

I’m a receding icefield. Without the moon

stabbing the lake. there is no white cold blade.

Without a duck that walks like a duck

and speaks an unnamed duck language.

Without duck, no artificial duck intelligence.

Without my father, I am not a son.

I am not a story teller

without my tale. Without beginning

there is no conclusion, no grief, no

memory. No mirror

without metaphor. No self.

Day 8 / Poem 8

untitled / David Burrows

here the breeze improvises
pulling the leaves, the branches
the symphony rises and falls
punctuated with the talk
of chickadees, robins,
jays and squirrels
footsteps approach and recede
the solar rays warm my ears
something’s ever new
I might pick up the smell
or jingle, the trot or yap
of another dog
so you see that’s why
I jump up on the bench
to sit, invite you to the same
why I plant my butt on your lap
and patrol every scent
or step of a two or four legged
every drop of sunlight
millions of them caress me
touch by touch
every moment of time
I’m telling you
it’s awesome!
the arrival of every chirp or bip
thwack or tap
buzz of a bicycle wheel
any bug that slithers
truck that rumbles
here I’m alive and so are you
that’s why I turn to you
and lick your nose
thankful for you
for this life

a mouth full of sand / Miriam Calleja

After Cathy Ferrell’s Women who wake

How can I speak
if speaking will untether
your image of how I should be?
And, in choking down sand,
how will the sand dollars fare?
And, will I use them
to shipwreck my way
backward, paying for silence?
And silence, how much
will that cost?

Women who wake / Cathy Ferrell

(with lines from Diane Seuss’ Threnody and Miriam Calleja Shaw’s There is no weakness; with inspiration from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening)

Edna Pontellier stepped into
an unabridged salt green sea.
Did she open her mouth there
on the sand? Did she try to shout?
They did not hear. Instead,
naked

silence in its entirety. Tongues bear the after
taste of grief. Our mouths are chock
full of it. So full
our cheeks bulge. Most of the time,
we choke
it down. Edna, did it stick

in your throat, too?
Breathing keeps us
buoyant. We float,
chest rising and resting in
the little sigh of coming to
surface, seaweed and hair clutched in our fists.

Carrying Me Back Home / Dralandra Larkins

Empathy had me feeling empty. I poured reciprocity

into the cups of others and starved myself of sweet generosity.

Forgot to dust myself from despair. Stressed about everyone’s problems caused me to overthink and create scenarios in my head that weren’t there. So, I picked myself up and carried me back home. Scribbled my sorrow on the page and turned my pain into poems. I had to summon my strength, believe in my abilities and un-become all I’ve ever known. I removed squares from my circle and learned to balance my emotions. I started to breathe with intention, got intentional with my focus.

I remember I cried so hard I drowned in my bedroom. Weary from watering my seeds with regret- looking back at the flowers of opportunities that didn’t blossom and bloom. I was tired of sprinting from my past and looking over my shoulder at relationships that didn’t last. It was time to face the flaws. Because I had given away so much, if not all.

It was time to stop adding anesthesia to the pain. Rip the bandaid and stop hiding these scars of shame. It took some realigning my health, redefining who I am and believing in myself. So, I am going where the sun rests and rise in laughter. I am carrying myself back home into the zone of a new chapter.

dog pack lament / Clyde Long

To my mentors and Tupelo Press friends in Truchas

Stacked next to me:
two boxes of ashes.

Two dogs gone, not
rising when I fetch a bottle.

My lone spaniel snores
as drugged, grieving.

Two weeks are daily
bled by falling rain.

Autumn is surrender
to waning colors.

I retreat to escape by
strong drink –

so sad I never empty
my glass.

The Jack-o’-Lantern / Taylor Mallay

In fluorescent aisles,
Autumn’s harvest waits—
pumpkins piled high at the market,
their orange skins
shining, plump and inviting.
I lift one, testing its heft
and decide right then to adopt it.
At my kitchen table, the first cut
releases stringy pulp, a rush of scent.

Here is my yearly sculpture!
Here is the cool heart
of another October, near passed.
I can’t help but laugh
at the gap-toothed grin,
the pair of wide, triangle eyes.
Not a masterpiece by any means—
but still alight, eager, and alive.

Guy from Arkansas on the Transplant List / Cecille Marcato

There was a guy on the ward whose liver had come to the same end as everyone else’s but for different reasons, not cancer or virus or debauchery. He ruined his liver by running over himself with a tractor. It’s true. Really. Farmers are so used to routines established by the sun’s journey and grinding necessity – count the cows, squeeze-chute the cows, move the cows from clover to rye grass – that they get, if not sloppy, well, prone to lapses. Maybe thinking about whether or not Germania will pay for the damage to the barn roof from a lightning bolt making contact with a wet, heavy oak. Or if the price of milk or beef will hold steady or maybe god willing rise or the co-op need to move after the hay caught fire and burned it to the ground. Maybe this man from Arkansas had such a lapse. He’d gotten down off his tractor to remove debris from his path at least hundreds of times since he was a boy. But this one time, just this once, he left the John Deere in gear, and it continued its advance. Pinned him to the tree from whence had fallen the severed limb that caused him to dismount, shredded his spleen and part of his liver. His spleen he could do without, but his liver, arguably second in command after the brain, was another matter. It’s a forgiving organ, as my husband and I certainly learned. But it can also hold a wordless but emphatic grudge.

bee / Lizzy Polishan

a bumblebee landed on the side

of my mouth i did not feel him

i could not see him i knew

he was there i was

in a motorboat

it was sunset the sun was a long

strip of gold that cracked

the sky i was inside

a fabergé egg

someone was opening that’s how it felt

look at the water

said the bee i don’t know how

to swim i said i’ll teach you

said the bee you don’t know how to

swim i said i can

fly said the bee the bee put on a tiny orange

life jacket i put on a tiny orange life jacket

someone opened the egg &

we fell out

Ramzan Kadyrov Says / Gordon Taylor

Day 7 / Poem 7

untitled / David Burrows

in early morning rehearsal

the cello yearns

and piano points to love

filling all souls church

with the Kol Nidrei

the people clap

the choir sings ose shalom

hi ya’aseh shalom aleinu

v’al kol Yiisrael, v’imru

amein

the sound goes inside

vibrates the heart

I cry for the world

translated

may the one who creates peace on high

bring peace to us and all Israel

Amen

in the service they sing it again

I cry for peace

congregants recite their transgressions

forgive us we say in unison in response

at the end they all clap

There is no weakness / Miriam Calleja

in the falling,
in the fistfuls of hair,
in being brought to the surface
tingling with pain
and the blurriness of coming to.

                                                              As you drop one stone
                                                              into water and then another
                                                              displacing and letting gaps
                                                              fill, the breath becomes
                                                                                                                                  even— a chest rising and resting in
the little sigh of coming to

Women who nap / Cathy Ferrell

Bed calls at
midday, when
the eyes drowse and honey

themselves shut. Sleep curls
thick as nectar.
We hexagon ourselves,

invert. Always
a fan. Hours ripen
sweet. We seal

away. For a moment,
the unbearable buzz
subsides.

#Free Palestine, Gaza On My Mind / Dralandra Larkins

Limbs and bones
lay on the countertop of the earth.
Blood spill from chilled
bodies like wine. The dirt absorbs
the blood from the earth like bread and patiently waits
for its next plate of bones, its next spoonful of limbs.
The bodies, the flesh served cold.

A child lies amid rubble, dying alone,
taking their last breath, shearing a mothers soul.
World leaders, gather their egos
over collective conformed confusion. Raise their glass
of booze and vinegar in toast, but this is no one’s Thanksgiving!
Gather here for this genocide, for this feast of violence!
In this recipe of slaughter,
we swallow the wailing tears
of someone’s son, cousin or daughter.
Then, pat our mouths in silence with closed napkins,
devouring their execution.
In the palm of my hands,
I witnessed an air strike drop from the sky launching an erasure of human life.
I sit and do absolutely nothing.
How many more bullets? How much money would it take
to extinguish another burning cross, a broken bridge,
another burning hospital, school, or mosque?
If only their guns could kill oppression,
if only their bombs could shatter affection,
crack open compassion and explode empathy,
I wonder, then, would this country feel?
Perhaps, the world’s leaders do not want peace, but instead new resistance.
To spit their spitefulness on a region
and form the birth of a new country that does not know peace.\

But, rather
they create citizens who take their rights
in the palm of their hands and clench their fits by any many necessary!
I hope, then, this world
would wake up during war in a cold sweat!
I hope compassion,then,
rip through your body,
tears you into pieces,
and burns your flesh
alive!

Deep nightfall / Clyde Long

In blackest sky’s velvet blanket,
salt shaker seasoned with distant
suns measured in light years

my gaze turns its hope upward,
anchored here as the sun
metronomes its nights and days,

all the way until our end – a
beat that by measures scares
us or spurs antic ambition.

To relax from day I search
night sky in vain for my moon,
its lunar salve applied each day,

its Rx renewal monthly, rhythm
commanding tides and blood –
but storm clouds hide tonight.

Crickets slow their calls as deep
night falls, a blanket, a cudgel, and
I am left to dreams’ escape.

Blue / Taylor Mallay

Years after the last word between us
drifted into nothing, the memory of your room returns

in the evening, like a small boat, an invitation.
And some nights I accept—settle against that doorway

again but do not move past it.
I only come to look for a moment.

Not at the wall’s shade or the floor’s shine,
not the tossed sheets or the streaks of light across the bed,

but one half-lit corner painting
of a woman at the edge of an ocean,

dark hair down, right hand reaching out, out
to all that open blue. In my room alone, I wonder

if she was me or if she was you.

Power Outage / Cecille Marcato

The neighbor’s house
is dark as is the whole block,
the neighborhood. The upstairs
picture window of his boxy
place glows intermittently, pulses
like a candle flame.

It might be a candle
or his house could be on fire
or maybe it’s a reflection
of my room just across the street
which could be the one ablaze
as I have lit both the St. Anthony
& St. Benedict pillars.
Respectively, they help me find
what is lost, remember to study,
work & sing (the Rule of Benedict).
In the dark of my home
they are untended, something against
the laws of candle-burning.

Or it could be heat lightning
just north of the city,
a foil to the violent strikes
to the south. The whole town
where we live – & beyond it,
the world – might be burning,
sooner than we’d expected,
as I bear witness to the flashing
opaque glass, sitting on my porch
waiting for some human light.

untitled ((sartre/selfhood/closed system)) / Lizzy Polishan

once we were on a big black spacecraft //.\\ we were floating //.\\ we were headed to alpha centauri //.\\ it was getting dark because it was always getting dark //.\\ we were drinking orange tang because we ran out of guava strawberry //.\\ you were carrying around being & nothingness because you were always carrying around being & nothingness //.\\ & you never opened it up //.\\

you had a crystal tamagotchi & i had a crystal tamagotchi //.\\ your tamagotchi looked like a tiger & my tamagotchi looked like something that didn’t exist //.\\ sometimes they looked dead //.\\ both tamagotchis hatched from a pixelated icon of a speckled egg //.\\ if we bump together our tamagotchis & press a specific button one tamagotchi will disappear //.\\ after a while it will return //.\\ you said we could do this for a while in a while //.\\ i said okay //.\\ we kept on floating //.\\ you kept not opening your book //.\\

Packing a Suitcase / Gordon Taylor

ass replacing

every fallen noun

and adjective autumn’s

pretty ass crimson maple

leaves drop like soft bombs

onto the beige ass silver flecked

sidewalk and overhang

my dumb ass staircase leading

from and to my safe ass rooms

where a shirtless broken

broke ass porn stache

ass musk hook up dozes

in the ass trashed double

bed near the empty

closet and the cracked

ass teacup stains a jasmine ring

on a stack of books and blank

pages flutter on the creaky writing

desk by the open ass window

as the loud ass morning

doves coo through

ash this war

our long ass death

Day 6 / Poem 6

untitled / David Burrows

all shapes and colors none the same
the rocks are speaking as I step
a hidden language whispered here
my boots are torn the leather frayed
I walk to water through the woods
with Keith and Benny behind ahead

the canopy of trees above
protect my skin from heat and sun
a falling tree slap claps the earth
and something heard it, it was me
a cricket sings from forest floor
as branches reach into the light
to green their leaves and sip the air
above the whooshing of the creek

to waters edge to drink and seek
stout Benny pulls me through the moss
to climb and sit atop my lap
upon a rock cut like a chair
and steady still we nestle there

Breathing too loud / Miriam Calleja

Today’s birth is stark,
the noises crisp.
I only give the sideways glances
that cannot be seen
in another room
where I have no energy
for a fight.

Some days the earth
seems to be sinking
and taking all its women
down to the water table
between what’s saturated
and unsaturated:
where spaces are full.

There’s nothing there
to boil over
to diminish with a gaze
the towels have been replaced
the glass is full
and all seem to be breathing
at a bearable breadth.

Women who tend¹ / Cathy Ferrell

Everyone wants
to eat, but no one wants
to cook. Isn’t that the way
of the world? It seems I lose my
temper at the least little thing.
We’ve borne many lives. Least of all
our own. It’s a slapstick
morning, if only you could
see. I‘m glad I filled
the coffee maker,
last night. A little honey,
the last of the milk, my best
chipped smile.

¹serve, incline, listen, watch over

Untitled / Dralandra Larkins

True love isn’t lustful or fast.
It’s not a flash of passion
without action;
it’s calm,
steady
like a slow burn from a candle,
the flame is meant
to burn
a lifetime.

Sleep Aids / Taylor Mallay

For a year, I took them:
melatonin, diphenhydramine,
CBD, and THC.
Four warm Coors Lights
pulled from the back of the pantry.
A sip of gin in a dark kitchen.
Sometimes I drove to a bar
and drank until my spine relaxed,
until breathing became easy.

People came up to me then:
a man in an oil-stained shirt
with the name Dave
stitched in red across the breast,
who wanted to tell me
about his tour in the Navy,
about jolting awake each night
in Afghanistan.

And a woman, Colleen,
who had just retired
from thirty years teaching,
whose sister had died
a week prior.
Three beers in,
she began to stare at me
as if I were a holy icon,
grabbed my hand and said,
Every day is a blessing,
really.

Months went by.
I traded Coors for chamomile,
pills for soft linen—
even opened the windows
at dusk to hear
the nightingales singing.
And Death,
who had been waiting
in the wings for my signal
all this time,
smiled and finally
stepped from my door
into shadow.

Exhale / Clyde Long

Last in the parking lot
turn the car key.
     Ignition, exhale.

Next inhale all the
air you can, hold it,
close your eyes
     curl your toes
splay your hands
into starfish –
     release.

Vision clears, no more
monochrome.
Back up ready
     to escape –
you grip the wheel
     asking why.

As you survive to home
you exit the car
praying,
pull the parking brake.
Deadbolt your home tight –
Now what?

in the car / Lizzy Polishan

lisa frank
erasers

yellow
laffy taffy

shake shack order
receipt
             vanilla shake
             large fry
             saint vincent

concert
tickets
louise glück

quote
tucked
inside

your shining
phone
case decorated

w glittery
stickers: teeny

     totoros     assorted
clocks     glow-in-the-dark
     orchids     holographic

ghosts
seashells
you

collected
at the foot of

a lighthouse called
i forgot

A Boy Watches Movies on Sunday / Gordon Taylor

first i was Kate Hepburn

in On Golden Pond hoping

my family would get along

i was also my daughter Jane

Fonda waiting for my father

to love me before he died

i was Julianne Moore hiding

in the bathroom in The Hours

pretending to be fine

i felt trapped in a straight life

when i had a gun in my holster

i was a cowgirl Mercedes

McCambridge in Johnny Guitar

i shot a man in the head from my horse

and i was more badass

than Joan Crawford but not as good

as non-chronological scientist

Amy Adams arriving

late to deciphering my alien grief

i was Michelle Williams in Manchester

by the Sea and i couldn’t stop

crying while i was Kerry Fox

in An Angel at my Table

typing and hiding my wild

curly hair was part of the plot

i’m Jackie Weaver

a subtle mob boss ordering cops

killed in Animal Kingdom without

my depression’s unsuitable guilt

i’m Linda Hunt a diminutive man

in Year of Living Dangerously deceiving

Mel Gibson who deserves it

i rise and rewind into Geraldine Page

rushing up a candlelit

church aisle in Interiors

running from my own rage

the only revenge i can take

since i’m too old to be angry at my father

is to arrange an exquisite vase

on a bare pine table

before i walk slowly into the ocean

and speaking of Sigourney Weaver

i’m hiding from an ice storm

rolling into a deep insensible sleep

where love never fails

and children survive their youth

i’m Marilyn in The Misfits

written by my new ex- husband

my last role

you can see it in my gaze

i am more beautiful

when i stop caring

i’m Marisa Tomei in the bedroom

and my man is shooting my eye out

because he doesn’t trust me

Sissy Spacek is covering it up

and she escapes with Martin Sheen

to the Badlands her personality

disorder is secondary to her summer clothes

it’s just main character syndrome

wanting the entire film to myself

i tell Mom why my marriage ended

in ‘night Mother and why i must leave

and i’m shooting my father’s gun

at a wall off stage just before the credits

i’m Mercedes McCambridge again

secretly running the ranch in Giant

but i’m dead and my brother is mean

and my nephew is James Dean

Day 5 / Poem 5

untitled / David Burrows

Your ears draw back and feet dig in
not wanting to end the walk
and so we go round again
I try to sound
authoritative
When I tell you to sit and come
and heel, steer you this way and that
I got this, I say, when a dog comes near
your space, hoping you’ll think
I’m the alpha and all’s safe.
everyone watches when you
lose it and bark, growl and lunge
In operatic baritone
as I hold you back
I’ve lost the daily game
again…and again

Inside, a furnace / Miriam Calleja

after a line by Cathy Ferrell

ceramic inverted hug
holder of morning verve
joie de vivre
heat that can be cupped
held in nascent wake
desire that I slept with
woke with
smell of bitterness
turned sweet
with the sun
with morning commotion
when everything
everyone
wants to eat

Women who write / Cathy Ferrell

On my bedside table, a stack
of stones, small and smooth.
I think of your
scholar. How he waits
stoic, serene.
We pass through many
moods. The stones remain
balanced. In this moment, I flex
my mind. Imagine.
You tap your keys. You uncap
your pen. Words flow, these days.
How moving to converse this way,
back and forth, lotused.

Lifeguard / Dralandra Larkins

We all have fears, right? My biggest fear is a failure to succeed and rats. I hate them! My mom, who’s my best friend, biggest fear is swimming. She never learned how to swim, so naturally she’s afraid of water. But she doesn’t realize she’s been swimming all her life.

When my my father used his fit as flowers
it would look like a storm hit our home.
There were no evacuations, no warnings, no safety zone. Just a telephone and faith.
As wooden furniture spirals in space.
Glass splatter and shatter like showered rain drops,
This is daddy’s sweet destruction, this is daddy’s chaos!
Remnants of his saliva, DNA on my mother’s face. Her flesh,
torn from his scorn and bloody rage.

Even then,
my mother didn’t know that she could swim.
Because she never surrendered to the current-
current circumstances in her life.
She never kept our sorrow on the shallow side.
She always deep dived
into vulnerable places. Damaged, but not easily broken or shaken.
Seamed scars stitched on her skin, yet she didn’t train her words
or sweeten the truth with promise and pretend-she was real.

On the sidelines, I’ve watched my mother
backstroke out of the gutters of guilt
when waves of addiction
almost pulled her into relapse
she recovered on her own with no help
no team, coach or counselors, without a lifeline of support
while swimming in his pool of poison
called love without a choice.

My mother
doesn’t know that she can swim.
Like when the streets, belly of the beast Madison Chicago
tried to swallow her whole. She put one elbow in front of the other
surfed through the currents and depth of depression with all her soul.
Under the pressures of poverty and insomnia of abuse,
My mother put on a life jacket of Jesus and held scripture close to her chest,
submerged herself in Romans and shouted proverbs she knew best!
Remained gracefully in butterfly position even when life was hard.
She’s been breathing underwater all her life, saving herself
as her own lifeguard.

On Corgis / Clyde Long

Mine is a red Pembroke Corgi.
A break from my packs of retrievers
and strays and mixed hero dogs.
She may be a breed that’s right for you.

Be honest with yourself – are you smart?
Because Corgis are. Talk to them
like a C+ middle schooler – they will
understand and maybe even obey.

It’s like mine has a wristwatch.
She keeps a schedule of breakfast,
play, treats, play, nap, dinner,
treats, walks – in that order or else.

Queen Elizabeth owned many of these –
but her vast staff handled the shedding.
Your humble Dyson vacuum will not
survive more than a year.

So what if they herd toddlers and cats,
barking to enforce order?
Their photogenic fetching smiles and
fluffed sploots outweigh all that.

This is surely not a purebred dog pitch
but believe me, Corgi dogs are
short legged fun to keep you active
and smiling, playing along with them.

Every Sunday Morning / Taylor Mallay

the phone rings—
my grandmother’s voice winds through static,

light as the creek curling around her back porch,
where, as a kid I’d sit, catching fish

on a thin metal pole: perch, bluegill, and trout
thrashing wild in my little tin bucket.

In the afternoon sun, I’d trudge my catch
to the kitchen, and she’d fry them up crisp,

smiling as they hit the cast iron pan,
the iridescent pool of oil.

These days, I sit with greater patience,
hoping weekly to reel even the smallest glimpses

of the porch, and the kitchen,
and my grandmother’s laughter,

before the hum of the creek fizzles out
and only the weight of the line remains.

Postcard With Pueblo Pot on Adobe Wall / Cecille Marcato

Dear J – Supping on sushi in Santa Fe. Your teenager
could run this place & it’d be an improvement. The
chefs – an Italian dude & a Pueblo man in a tie-dyed
T-shirt – speak solomente Espanol; hostess is in a
mini-skirt & top two sizes too small. A boy about 14
speaking Farsi (maybe), a 30-something mobster-
type, & a languid woman I think is Katy Jurado
reincarnated are servers. The multi-culti chefs stand
behind a circular bar, hub of 5 adjoining private rooms
separated by shoji screens & shoes parked outside.
The boy & the wise guy zoot around the dining rooms
yelling at each other & reprimanding the cooks as
though the place were empty (it’s not) & they (the
sushi-makers) weren’t brandishing Japanese knives
that mean business. Katy stonewalls her orders like a
DMV employee. It’s Keystone Kops on crack serving
landlocked raw fish to tourists from Ohio. Food’s good,
though. Wish you were here blah blah. All this adobe.
How do people stand it? xxo, h.

tiger lily / Lizzy Polishan

come summer i hum

pure color * my tepals open

umbrellal, in shades

distilled from gummy

candy * gumdrops * dum-dums * clumsy

hummingbirds circumnavigate

my stem my handsome stem / strumming

heartbeat momentum over this jumbled

kingdom: pumpkin chrysanthemum plum

* someday we’ll become

accustomed to dominion’s tumble:

the fumble of human

thumbs, the communion of common

umbras, the numb

boredom of blossoming *

becoming *

becoming some

thing

* becoming something

that means

something

to someone *

You Give Me the Blues/ Khamil Riley

Sing me a night time tune.
Something smooth,
a little sultry
So when you touch me
I’ll forget
all that there is to lose.
The music,
is so we don’t feel used.

Time is not the illusion,
I am.
To be felt through your senses,
Perceived,
but not to be put in
Some box or some cage.
Our joining together is
One most glorious transfusion.

That is, until the day breaks.

Until our bones crack and then
more than just our hearts ache.
What would you do if you could turn back?
Things like this fall far beyond me,
So I just wonder would you
Sing a new song,
but keep the same melody?

I’d be there to sing along.

So give me my something sweet
I’ll swing my hips
While you keep the beat.

The Ladder / Gordon Taylor

so we climbed

toward a sparking wire

falling, returning

until the ladder’s creaking top cap

seemed beyond reach

we climbed, again

each year becoming shorter, until I slipped

from the lowest rung

and air glistened

with scatters of rain as I lay on my back

looking up at you

hope is wet

necks and arms

the spit of a kiss

if I could undress you

now on the peeling paint porch of your house

and search your soaked skin

after running

through the shining green

length of a storm

if i could undress

and know ecstasy without you

Day 4 / Poem 4

untitled / David Burrows

When I am
an old man
I shall let my feet
be free
to wander
where they’d like
to be
up rocky trails
of the Sangre de Christo
to wildflowers
above Denver
in the forgiving blue
sky
to let go
in lily pad lakes

into the himalayas
to walk amid the clouds

on Hermes’ winged shoes
into the halls of gods
and ‘cross the stars

into the wormhole
tunnel Of the heart
that
when you pass through
turns the universe
inside out
like a sock

The riddle is daily / Miriam Calleja

After 373 by Emily Dickinson

A scholar sits on my bedside table
cross-legged for generations
he laughs at the simplicity of his wisdom
like a tooth that’s started to move.
He tells me to pluck what isn’t working.
He rearranges his lotus pose,
cracks his fingers
(this is all a show, all for my attention,
he never gets uncomfortable).
I can’t unsee the simplicity
nor follow the instructions of a stoic,
stuck as I am—a moving tooth myself
in gums of pink-stretched desire
possession is sugar
laziness divine—
comfort the ultimate wish.
His bones don’t even groan,
despite his patience. He’ll try again,
tomorrow and tomorrow—
The World is not Conclusion

Women who sweat / Cathy Ferrell

wake tangled
damp uncovered

Inside, a furnace

Salt moisture lick
of skin half asleep sweep
away valley rivulets wick
between swollen hills.

Inside, a Banshee

Sometimes, wake with
mouth wide open.
Swallow keen of
her echo h y s t e r i c a l

Other Black Things continued / Dralandra Larkins

Mothers’ mascara-stained tears and
stitched eyes in a coma.
Trayvon Martin’s hoodie.
The sole of a jackboot’s
contact with tender flesh
pressed against black pavement.
A prison cell.
A body in confinement.
A mind in confinement.

Dark, dilated pupils
in fight, flight or freeze,
a steel baton
pinned on the nape
of neck, breath
escapes from the mouth,
floating like invisible
debris. Discarded
Breathe or sink.
When God shows no mercy.

Black
like a scab hardening
into a
protective crust.

The walk / Clyde Long

I limp sprained along a
dusty weed bordered
cattle road, its summer
seeds blown aloft,
no sign of a horizon
or forks left or right

A murder of crows
gathers with threats,
a scene I avert and
continue past careful
to venture onward ever
vigilant, a little scared.

Ancient barbed wires
snag human debris
impaled over decades
from other travelers,
almost decorations
waving in the breeze.

Arrival is not in sight.
It makes sense to heed
dark weather ahead.
I hope to reach an end
not too soon, not too late,
with just luck.

The Couple / Taylor Mallay

The Weerdinge Couple were found side-by-side in a bog in 1904. At first assumed to be a husband and wife, they were later determined to be two men, and their relationship to each other remains unknown.

Peat-clung, earth-sunk, we lay
interlaced in the bog’s arctic grasp.
Centuries pass.
They lift us into harsh light,
peer and ponder.
Before they claim us
father/son, battlefield brothers,
or perhaps victims
of an ancient custom,
they see how we lean
towards each other,
your arm at my waist,
your hand on mine;
they say—husband/wife,
clearly a couple
of lovers.

Somehow
through time
our bodies held
the life we hid:
the nights my fingers trailed
the length of your back,
muscles flushed
with sweet, wet sweat—
a look,
and more than that.

So we rose
and were known at last,
it seemed, as two true souls
in the open air,
forgetting for a moment
all that deep, cold dark
and the world of men, until
some ancient custom
rushed to cloak us—
cast to the depths
again.

Second Lockdown / Cecille Marcato

Frank wasn’t someone
who enjoyed surprises
didn’t appreciate the trickery
involved in his commitment
didn’t like being in the hospital
that second time
although a still-cogent part
of him, the part that romanticized
where he lived
might have enjoyed
that the Sheriff himself
had pocketed the key.

Because of the guns
Frank went to the top-floor
lockdown where another patient prayed
to a door much of the day. In his way

Frank prayed to the door as well
that it would open so that
with his funny gait
he could walk through
a free man.
No longer a believer
he hired a lawyer.

Orientation Video, or: everything that happened in this garden before you arrived / Lizzy Polishan

power outage => dragonflies
whirr forth from outlets & invent
language => an aguey
slow-mo
montage => ravaged
vegetables! => shadows snag

on flagella => gigantic flagella(!!)

nibble imagination’s ridged edge => offstage
             => the fragrance of lace croaks forth from unzipped luggage
             into the saggy slag…
                                                 …crush this kitschy
                                                 bandage over your missing
                                                 rib
a voice counts down the looming
attoseconds
so softly even gnats
listen, whisper pink
light, sift light into pink
velvet, sibilant
twilight, soften summer
dirt…
            ….& this earthworm planet…lichen-kissed, viscous,
            sleepy, sleepily
                                       ripped from silky
milky sleep &
                        made
                        to listen.
i rode here on a supermassive photon
across an ocean of supermassive gravitational waves
it was almost midnight
my optical tweezers fell out of my pocket
my heart fell out of my heart
it was just

me &
my organelles
wanted to make
             marzipan // invent
pickleball // paint
paint chips // name everything
             everything // devour
colors // carpenter
rainstorms // unspool
             the walls //

REMAINING SOFT: a sestina/ Khamil Riley

All I know of this life is love.
something beneath which mountains will fall
and crumble. holds the power to
run rampages and still make it home to kiss me
nice, and slow, and soft.
A joy no other could beat.

That’s what I thought until I lost my heartbeat.
Until I started to lose interest in the things I love.
I remember back when the world looked soft.
Now, yellow orange trees whisper of sweet fall
and it all looks like winter to me
cold, dark, and lonely too.

So what then am I to hold on to
when life starts to feel down trodden and beat?
I guess I just need to get back to me.|it’s true, all I ever knew of myself was love
and so back in love with myself I must fall.
Gift myself with a life still soft.

The most important thing is to remain soft.
Feel everything and never be afraid to
play this game of life. You might find that fall
is more than just the changing of leaves. Hear that beat?
That right there is the song that I love.
The one that reminds me of me.

I won’t ask anymore what’s wrong with me
cause I’m learning now to treat myself soft.
still learning, well, what do I know of love?
I know it has the power to turn my bitter days into
sweet ones without even skipping a beat.
The power to turn winter back into fall.

What sound is made if there’s no one around to hear when I fall?
Though the idea sounds strange and foreign to me,
I’d like to think there’d be some kind of beat.
Something a little sultry with a hint of something soft.
Maybe I’d get up and do a dance, or two.
Get back to doing the thing that I love.

That’s the beat that’ll keep me breathing as my days fall
into nights and back, a reminder of all I’ve already got in me.
Remaining soft is the thing that I will hold on to.

Appetite / Gordon Taylor

The mayfly’s life is so brief

he has no need for food.

He has no mouth.

During restriction phases

I gather belly fat

into my hands and squeeze.

Think of a balloon

deflated. Think of beige

crepe paper. I’m tired.

Editing seems like killing

myself. I’m bingeing

mini-donuts at my desk.

Sugar dust mixed with dried

saliva pastes my lips.

If only eating was simple

as wanting to live

wide as mountain range, millennia

passing before moon-

pulled sheets grind me to sand.

This is ambition’s

landslide, needing to quicken

discovery, when our brains are rotting

fig and we need to know

ourselves to heal.

I know I wanted

to be wanted. It was a disease.

My avatar devoured me.

Last night I bit into the swell

of a man’s shoulder

tasting oatmeal and sea.

I swallowed his illegible, bruised

moans, to keep his pleasure—

to die without dying.

Day 3 / Poem 3

never so Close / David Burrows

she pauses
hovers at my chest
a petal away
gazes at the bright
red shirt

are you the sweet
I seek?

her wings hum so fast
they’re not visible
her ruby breast to mine

I freeze

are you a power
a message
a connection
to source?

can I with you
hummingbird
be other
than glum?
glorious

one with nature

magical

she darts away
into the pines
the ground is moist
about grand lake

Sheets are millefeuille / Miriam Calleja

scurrying in turmoil
I am hurricaned
to sleep, the weight
on my retinas, goodnight,
shut off any trouble,
it’s better that I don’t know,
unstitched from a dream
maybe, or can’t
decide. My fingers crawl
to the next body.
I uncover my eyes.

Rotary Beads / Cathy Ferrell

(Hail Mary) The cranes called to each other
this morning, brass and timbre across field.

(Our Father) called this afternoon,
but I missed it.

(Hail Mary) In September, I am forced to watch
repeats of political ads, calls to vote one way or another

(Pendant) Heart yearns for all
things beyond window, cries

(Cross) Old woman learns the hard way,
prays to a sullen rotary phone

that no one will call

Other Things, Black / Dralandra Larkin

Onyx and Jasper
sit on a slender, brown wrists
as a suit of
armor.
Pure black
like Tourmaline
in unfiltered sunlight
in the depths of a hole,
absorbing.

In ancient cultures,
felines of night symbolize
good karma and protection.
I read once,

women in Senegal
tattoo their gums
black
as the epitome
of beauty.

All that
shit the west fed us
about black being
cursed
Was A Lie!

Has any funeral ever been honest?
Endings are rebirth
like death,
a second chance.

tinnitus play-list / Clyde Long

It’s my personal Spotify, ad-free
except for my Corgi’s begging.
A gentle tinnitus that wanders
in and out, hearing aided —
bonus being I can change treble
and bass and volume by app.

On some cold rainy nights
my furnace rhymes its songs.
Heat vent sounds in each room
no matter when or why are
somehow curated just for me;
play-lists played for me alone.

Sometimes vagrant ear worms
burrow in hiding, biding their
time to overwhelm me with
their oldies and jingles or even
thrums of my old ’67 Chevelle.
They improvise inside both ears.

Yaks with myself also intrude.
That’s okay most days.
The ears are mine, so of course
I listen to what I shouldn’t say.

The Weather / Taylor Mallay

Every year, I act surprised
to see the once-green trees
freckled gold and red.
I shake my head
with a kind of ho-hum resignation,
wonder how much light
we have before season’s end
but otherwise ignore it.

The morning we meet for coffee,
I can taste the coming chill.
We embrace, smile, sit—
the usual.
But this time, I notice
the jerk and twitch
of your limbs,
the strange angles they make
and the losing force
of your will to refuse them.

You mention an increase
in your medication.
I nod, though there’s a limit
to how high you can go
and we know
you’re closing in on it.
You say,
Parkinson’s is progressive,
shrug with a kind of acceptance.
But I could only think
of the sun when it sinks
and seems to take
everything with it.

Daughter to father—
I wish there was more
I could offer,
I wish we knew
each other better,
and I wish
we could do something
about the weather.

Punnett Squares / Cecille Marcato

Muscle memory, there’s the mystery –
how it travels through the body
on little nervy runways stretching
for miles, flies between generational
landing strips, body to body bringing
instructions on trauma, for how to hold
a spoon, on the love of collecting
or whiskey – all written on a cell,
that microscopic recipe card,
not in words but electricity.
The body remembers
not just a special meal but every breakfast
& dinner your ancestors ever ate,
every drink ever drunk;
the way a grandfather stood & moved
the way his grandfather stood & moved.

Communication / Lizzy Polishan

Sometimes talking to you feels like
I am an alien & you are
an alien from a different galaxy
or maybe even
a different dimension & a sheet of tin-foil
is suspended between us & we have to keep
shouting what? what? what???? until finally
we realize we’re both
from Alpha Centauri both from Rigil
Kentaurus both from Proxima
B, all along.

It’s always been easier for me to talk to you
than other people because
I always feel
like

I never know    how to finagle            what I want
      to say into            words other people   can
understand       exactly in the exact way           I mean
them to mean, & with you, for once, we both
had to do
the gymnastics of translation
                                       if we wanted
                                       to be understood.

Sometimes when you want
to tell me something but you don’t know the words, you find
a song with words you know I know & a feel
the real feel that says what you mean. You play
me the song, on the car-ride home from work. Sometimes
I get it. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I don’t.

Early Onset SAD / Khamil Riley

“Jump up!” yelled Autumn
“You’re in for a great Fall!” Still,
I didn’t care at all

Rift / Gordon Taylor

My phone’s shiny screen is a night lake.

Come and stay awhile.

You visit once a year and expect me to entertain you.

The staircase slats have gaps like a smile.

The more time you spend healing, the less time you spend travelling.

You tell me I’m too emotional.

The surface of the windy lake is the blade of a bread knife.

Here is a place to retrace our steps.

We’re afraid of anger.

The den is full of stacks of smudged paper.

Walk backward through castles and ruins.

Hold onto decades of elastics saved from the mail.

The kitchen has a stove with a bubbling volcano pot.

This home offers everything we need.

Souvenir knick-knacks, a love language.

The surface of the windy lake is a ridged fingernail.

A variety of wildlife, including loons and lilies, live here.

You never call me.

Day 2 / Poem 2

the Wooden Boy leaves the shop / David Burrows

If only he could leave
the dust of the toy shop
the little wooden cars
ships and dolls
bears with moving joints
and journey
as she did
a quark in a supernova
experience the collapse of stars
chaos
whom he thought she was
a Siva creator destroyer
and as he pondered this
the doorknob squeaked
as it turned
And there she was
to let him out
come on, she fired
he shrunk for a sec
then followed her into the night
where an owl said hoo
maybe now I will
feel, he thought
as they leapt falling
into the moon

Ritual for a lost seafarer / Miriam Calleja

After Ritual for a Traveler by Cathy Ferrell

The rotary phone is rose pink
or maybe it is crepe pink
tinted with memory infused with the grey
of nights we have
locked up. You had to lift the receiver to confirm
that no, no one was trying to call.

My mother’s fingers on a rosary,
beads of sweat stick on the dial
O, Mulej. Half sentences,
words also jammed. Prayers sent
into the salty night, who knows
they get carried on land breeze.
A litany of saints evoked to help—

St. Anthony’s on speed dial,
Madonna, omm Alla, itlob għalina,
għamel li jaslu b’wiċċ il-ġid.
Nothing wishing to ask for favors,
asking and begging all the same
to bring back safely
blood lost at sea.

Women who burn / Cathy Ferrell

(in response to Those who have sinned and repented by Miriam Calleja Shaw)

We singe the slump off our shoulders, spark the ends of our hair.

Try to tell us “Look away from the sun” and we’ll eclipse our own retinas.

We reach out and grasp old stars in a chokehold, burn the scars off our thumbs.

We cauterize regret.

We feed hot white light to words stuck midway up. If you could hear how we open our throats

we could douse you, too.

Watch ringlets of smoke curl from our nostrils. Touch us. Soft skin, armor.

We baptize ourselves alive, flame blue.

How to Wash Away Trauma / Dralandra Larkins

Wet your hands with humility. Look into the mirror and affirm you are not alone.
Apply enough compassion to cover all your scars and worries.
Clean the corners of your mind with a new and positive perspective about your life.
Lather your body with love, you are valuable.
Gently scrub toxic beliefs about yourself from your skin.
You did not deserve mistreatment.
Wash off their dust and the damage done to you.
Wipe the wear and toll from your body.
Cry in the shower for as long as you need.
Exhale.
Rinse your wounds thoroughly with your tears for at least 30 seconds.
Pat your tears dry with forgiveness.
Turn off the memories.
Squeeze the pain of your past from your towel, hang it to dry.
Breathe.
You are now safe

Pencil to paper / Clyde Long

Sphere comes first
try to draw it round but
don’t worry
scribble a moon or sun
up above, left or right
imagine
beams down below
light and shade
the endless curve
a perfect sweet spot.

Next draw a cube
dimensions on paper
lines teasing perspective
foreshorten, distort
control the vertical
the horizontal
control all you see —
make building blocks
like a wizard.

River’s End / Taylor Mallay

The store’s black roof rasps
a crackled tune—another week
of such thick heat, it swallows
our morning dew,
crisps our fresh green leaves,
silences the rain’s sweet hum
on our windows at dusk.
Still, the baby must come soon:
an autumn child on the edge of winter,
while summer clings like an angry lover.

Slowly, I shuffle past collapsible strollers,
playpens with bluetooth speakers,
a shelf of heated wipe holders
before reaching the blankets.
I press a palm to the back of my neck,
wipe the sweat collecting,
inspect each plastic-wrapped tuft
of fleece and cotton
covered in stars, stripes, squiggly hearts—
an ark’s worth of animals, too,
living their lives in a world
where lions always laugh
and bears relax
in silk’s soft folds.

I pull one package down,
unzip it to trace the linen,
pausing at the last thread of
a river stitched, blue and bright
with gleaming fish.
I hold it close, imagine years,
a life, almost—until
I overhear a nearby conversation:
They say the Colorado’s drying up,
and the Mississippi, too.
Quietly, I put it aside.

Almanac / Cecille Marcato

Our hair grew according to
the Farmers’ Almanac, rhythms
that brought one full moon
after another, which brought dreams
each night – coyotes, Egypt,
small, troubled boys vexing
their mother. A beloved cat,
missing for years, turned out to be
alive, slept standing up
& did not remember me –
a hurt that plagued the whole waking day.
Our hair grew wavy & thick
as you studied your forecasts.
How we noticed the moons
one after another!

i forget / Lizzy Polishan

i learned the word 乌龟 :: we were sitting in traffic
you said everyone is a turtle today

i learned the word 月亮 :: you said don’t point
at the moon :: the moon will come cut off your ear

i learned 星星 :: 星巴克 :: 派大星 :: you said look
at the night sky :: i’ll have a matcha frappuccino :: i watched that cartoon

spongebob too we called him hai mian bao bao
i learned 海绵 :: 宝宝 :: you said sponge :: you said baby good job!

i learned the word 身体 :: you said your body is broken
:: eat one banana :: drink jiu jiu jiu

i learned 九九九 :: you said it’s in the kitchen
in the place sorry i forget the word for where

i learned the word for drawer :: to tell you
where i found it i forgot :: where i put the word

不要忘记 :: 不要记得 :: don’t remember :: don’t forget
:: i don’t remember which means which

you said sorry :: wo bu ji de liao too

Tired / Khamil Riley

If we begin at exhaustion
and work our way back,
perhaps then life will
cut us some slack.
With sandbag eyes
tied on a rope
You’d think they rise
And give us some hope
But nope.

Our Blankets beg us be bedridden.
Sleep remains, and now without spark
I find my resolve is left hidden
My will to live is left in the dark.
Easier still to come than go
I’m learning to accept
Life’s ebbs and flows.
For however it was that night I slept
A summer breeze blows
And my soul is kept.

FAKE IT ‘TIL YOU MAKE IT, MY PSYCHIATRIST SAID/ Gordon Taylor

pretending i’m not afraid

of ladders because people might fall from them

onto my head is like chanting

i love my scar

though i wince when i notice it

looking down

at a scale

weighing myself after a year

pretending i’m not afraid

pigeoning and squirreling through

traffic splashed with rain

frustrated horns

on this scratched green

bicycle Moses

parting puddles

pretending i’m great

full

tires kicking up mud

Day 1 / Poem 1

the Question / David Burrows

what if I could feel
said the wooden boy
if a scrape drew blood
if I could be sad or mad
or want to dance?

what do you feel now? she asked

good all the time he answered
chipper, positive

she gave him a kiss on the wrist
then reached in and pressed her lips
to his

how do you feel? she intoned
just the same he exclaimed
what am I supposed to feel? he said
I am the perfect boy, he continued
always ready to pitch in
my hair is short and neat
my clothes properly proper
all muted tones

what do you feel?
he asked the very real girl
with kaleidoscope hair
disheveled and spare
a patch on one eye

he thought he knew
because her eyes were amber fire
that she flew to the moon
when no one was looking
and adventured out
a mischievous cat
with lives he envied
from his quiet room
In his father’s shop
where all was tidy
and wood, and a clock
ticked each minute
each the same length
every toc same volume

so he wasn’t surprised
when she started to sing

Those who have sinned and repented / Miriam Calleja

Open a cap, a lid; lift the crust of the earth. Now, lower a baseball-stadium-sized antacid tablet gently.

Scaffold it down while chanting, dancing, saying a prayer, shouting. Bless it before sliding it down. Curse it.

Choose the wisest women to push it with their hearts in their throats, their hands joined. Don’t ever burn the women. Choose contortionists, shamans, and those who have sinned and repented.

Choose the fizzy cure made by hand in salt mines or the clay-covered, red-dirt dusted. Press the emergency exit button when the tablet has drowned in the earth’s core.

One dose may not be enough.

Ritual for a Traveler / Cathy Ferrell

A father, a mother, a son
A road trip
The Mother
The car
Red cliffs above
Santa Madre de Dios, las piedras

She rocks a figure
between her knees,
a statue plucked
straight from the garden.
The Mother

rocks back, forth
frozen folds and stone robes
back, forth
heirloom rosario

One hand clutches,
taps, rolls beads between
murmurs, signs
father, son,

espíritu santo
One drives on, sighs
One soothes the back
of her seat,
The Mother

small nose presses against window

True Colors of The Sun / Dralandra Larkins

My people!
We are a quilted blanket
of beautiful African hues,
A broad palette of melanin shades.
               We are children of the sun,
               sons and daughters of the rainbow
               who seek shelter
               in the rain,
absorb radiation,
               anchors us
               to the earth.

               Like velvet petunias,
               my people
               still bloom even when
               buried in dirt.

We are vitamins, we revitalize this earth.

Nature lives in our skin-
more than pigment,
we exist everywhere,
in water, in the heavens, galaxies,
even trees reflect
our wooly hair.
               Melanin is found in
               everything that breathes-
               we will breathe!
               Where there is melanin,
               where there are true colors of the sun,
               the creator is also.
               We are black diamonds
               shining in the
               hues
               of the cosmos.

Harvest time in Calistoga / Clyde Long

Across at the Farmers Market
a perfect season’s produce array,
tomatoes and new potatoes and
ripe figs so soft and precious, not
to mention fresh croissants and
piles of every shape of red pepper.

In the low angled autumn sun
Liquid Amber’s crimson leaves drop.
Yard guys will have their blowers
chasing after their impossible fall.
Those are electric now, so scents
swirl oak and walnuts, not fumes.

Gardening here is about grape vines
to be harvested on their perfect day.
Along the two winding highways
giant trucks haul the picked ripe fruit,
laboring with their shared ancient
prayer: may juice become fine wine.

The Fire in the Mirror / Taylor Mallay

In line at the gas station,
one girl leans on another,
whispers something
then laughs.
Her fingertips move
down the other’s spine
like light on the water.
Briefly, they kiss.
I turn away.

A man holding the handle
of an open cooler
glances at me,
eyes primed
for the smallest spark
coming off my body—
to him, a flare in the slow dark
of a summer evening.

Standing there, I sink
back into my 12 year-old self
cross-legged in front of
the living room TV.
How many times
did I practice
pulling the heat
from my cheeks,
train my gaze
to glass over
at the sight of a woman
on the screen,
afraid to be seen
wanting, without knowing why?

Older now,
I watch the couple leave
hand-in-hand.
I ache to ask them,
How did you find each other?
For a moment,
I imagine their response:
Somewhere in the dark,
the smallest spark.

PRISON RODEO / Cecille Marcato

Almost to Hunstville       just outside Hempstead
we could buy        watermelons for a dollar
but by October it was too late for that.
Daddy drove straight on       to the prison
to our cheap seats                 facing the sun
that extra dollar spent on cushions.
Convict cowboys                (a moniker I hear
they hated)                            there to entertain
& shock                                let the people enjoy
their schadenfreude —          We can leave when
this is over                               you cannot.
Rodeos can kill                      even a criminal
as though their lives before    weren’t dangerous enough
these ropers                             & riders
but many had been    cowpokes even before jail
or came from prison farms     (state-sanctioned slavery,
some said).                               They knew from cutting
horses    could tie three legs
of a calf & have it stay put for six seconds on the clock
risk embarrassment or death.
Trustees wore white moving through the crowd
little books in hand       & popcorn.  Like cigarette girls
in noir movies on TV after school.
From Daddy       I had a quarter for a program.
I read lady prisoners          sewed shirts (some striped across
some up-&-down      like prison bars)
that the crowds loved.           Weren’t they – the inmates –
supposed to   wear stripes like
cartoon                                 jailbirds?
Mother said, Women              in prison
aren’t ladies,                           Young Lady.
It seemed they could have   seized the opportunity
to walk through the gate live again on my side
of the wall    a change of clothes, amends.
Every life is like a poem    the popcorn man told me
through a dangling      cigarette. It has at least
one turn.                                  You have to try
to choose                                  the right direction.
A bull kicked a barrel,    a clown rolled out.

Centrifugal / Lizzy Polishan

i was half an electron cloud & you were becoming physical :: your body was a paper valentine & i was not ready to cut you out :: i was a palimpsest & you were too primordial to be recalled :: you turned your back & i was already turning back to ether :: ions :: ionized :: are you naturally so tall, or are your pretty winged sandals, their pretty seashell-pale wings, just so happy to be seen? :: the wingbeats feel like heartbeats :: do the wingbeats feel like heartbeats because you’ve always been a paper valentine? :: do you see that matrix of angels? :: flying overhead, of course, but if you close your eyes these canals we love under us feel umbilical:: almighty :: remember when you were the largest circle & i was the smallest matter? :: you were centrifugal force & i was not flying away?

LEAP / Gordon Taylor

There is a list of joy

synonyms in section 4 of the dialectical

behaviour handbook, including

bliss and cheer, euphoria

and hope, zest and zeal

gay, elation.

My favourite is bliss

because of the sibilant s.

Can you imagine a snake

smiling after a big meal?

I’m returning from hospital

after week 2 of rTMS treatment

ear ringing, eye twitching

shoelaces double tied

so I don’t trip over myself.

I facetime Joan as she walks

near the sunny North

Sea on Sylt, Germany.

The water is grey cellophane

and wind flips her new bangs

back from the glorious wrinkled

forehead she hides.

She says animals known

for hopping never suffer

from depression. Quick,

someone tell the elephants

it’s impossible to be sad

when you’re close to the sky.

Can you imagine jumping

on a grave like a childhood

mattress. Quick, someone call

the cops. I’m a crying kangaroo.

I’m skipping past rows of taxis

and patients smoking cigarettes

with tall IV pole companions.

I wonder if they’ve been nick-named.

I’m skipping home, swinging

my arms. I’m a coiled spring.

Day 31 / Poem 31

LET US SPEAK DELICATELY[1] / A Cento composed by Gordon Taylor

Day 30 / Poem 30

untitled / David Burrows

Ars Poetica for when you don’t recognize yourself / Miriam Calleja

In the waiting, the day is loosened / Cathy Ferrell

Truchas / Clyde Long

Dictionary of No Crying / Cecille Marcato

Try asking the moon for grace. / Lizzy Polishan

Better Days / Gordon Taylor

Day 29 / Poem 29

untitled / David Burrows

Let’s say… / Miriam Calleja

small wonder / Cathy Ferrell

After Sonnet 29 / Clyde Long

Lady Lawyer Explains Gravity to the Men of the Jury on a Sacrocolpoperineopexy Malpractice Case / Cecille Marcato

Cento with Questions / Lizzy Polishan

Great, Full / Gordon Taylor

Day 28 / Poem 28

untitled / David Burrows

Found poetry, medical appointments / Miriam Calleja

I hope you are having a wonderful day / Cathy Ferrell

The goodbye / Clyde Long

Hawk / Cecille Marcato

Sticker Sheet / Lizzy Polishan

Arson Poetica / Gordon Taylor

Day 27 / Poem 27

moon churn / David Burrows

I collect some good advice / Miriam Calleja

look, how disaster didn’t strike again / Cathy Ferrell

Reset / Dralandra Larkins

Blessings of St. Boniface in San Francisco / Clyde Long

Drawing Lesson / Cecille Marcato

Abecedarian Cento: After Death / Lizzy Polishan

Gratitude List – Bathhouse / Gordon Taylor

Day 26 / Poem 26

untitled / David Burrows

Scream into the wind / Miriam Calleja

primal / Cathy Ferrell

he lets go a sprig / Clyde Long

Nude With Cat / Cecille Marcato

Casino / Gordon Taylor

Day 25 / Poem 25

four haiku/ David Burrows

Citrus / Miriam Calleja

Writer’s Block / Cathy Ferrell

Dirty Dishes / Dralandra Larkins

Caresses Were Hands / Clyde Long

Some Days: Cento / Cecille Marcato

Until We Become We / Khamil Riley

EULOGY / Gordon Taylor

Day 24 / Poem 24

just north of Mumbai / David Burrows

The Deal / Miriam Calleja

How to be the unbothered cat in a room full of people / Cathy Ferrell

Untitled / Dralandra Larkins

Dead sea detour / Clyde Long

Origin Story With Scholia / Cecille Marcato

Kindly Copy & Deliver To: @prince_of_denmark @the_real_king_of_ithaca @the_yellow_flower_by_the_lake / Lizzy Polishan

Cancer Cells as Pop Art / Gordon Taylor

Day 23 / Poem 23

untitled / David Burrows

The Wailer / Miriam Calleja

The ballerina in my old jewelry box reconsiders the day / Cathy Ferrell

Five Things I Wish to Share With the World / Dralandra Larkins

Half Life / Clyde Long

The Way They Left It / Cecille Marcato

Abecedarian Cento, in which Athena’s Mother Prays to Catholic God / Lizzy Polishan

It’s Hard to Hate the Dead / Gordon Taylor

Day 22 / Poem 22

untitled / David Burrows

The Horns of Għaġuża / Haguza

La Llorona Justifies Herself1 / Cathy Ferrell

Reset / Dralandra Larkins

Easy for Flowers / Clyde Long

There Is No Language in this Country: A Cento / Cecille Marcato

Pink Cupcake / Lizzy Polishan

THE PLEASURE OF NAMING YOURSELF / Gordon Taylor

Day 21 / Poem 21

untitled / David Burrows

La Llorona Justifies Herself¹ / Cathy Ferrell

**After the bird in Kateryna Bilokur’s Flowers at Night – 1942** / Lizzy Polishan