THE September, 2024 30/30 PROJECT PAGE

The volunteer poets for September are:  Tameca L. Coleman, Christina Daub, Clint Frakes, Francis Judilla, Deborah Kelly, Rachel Cualedare, Nichols Skaldetvind, Corinne Walsh, Scott Williamson.

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

Day 15 / Poem 15

even when I have forgotten the song / Tameca L Coleman

I remember the singing against the tree even when I have forgotten the song

Imagine this: two singers, both backs against
the main wooden axis, which slowly sways.

They are silent against the tree’s stem for a while.
From a certain height, the singers are swayed.

Leaves, wind-moved, whisper through a hidden crack.
The singers’ breathing softens; they listen.

Then they open their mouths and sound music
until the chime of beautiful birdsong
brings them back into their forms, their bodies,
back towards their responsibilities,
at home in the chatter
and this cache, too,
available to be recollected.

At home, I see a sweet dog on a leash
toting a large new pinecone through the streets.

Nothing Milk Can Stay  / Christina Daub

Nature’s first milk is cow.
On this I’d bet the Dow.
Not almond, soy or oat,
Nor any kind of groat—
Just Bessie and her pail,
Streaming her white ale.
So Eden disappears;
The dairies in arrears.
Nothing milk can stay.
Just plants in your café.

Gravity Wins by a Nose /  Clint Frakes

“In each man,
a seed trembles
in search of heavenly waters…”
                                —Pablo Neruda

Galway Kinnell once prowled these barren halls
with his dagger & awl, inhaled brandy
in similar mist, his file cabinet full of contracts & artifacts.
He broke a vow, touching the thigh
of a gangly blonde in May.
I seek no such asylum on these asbestos floors.
6000 years of Chinese numerology tell me better. 
Nine years ago I faced loveless arms of the arroyo
& its eternal purple sand—collected what the rain
had stolen but no longer carried.

I burst to hear the story of the furnace
where they retire old caps & gowns.
My bones sloped over the river,
watching the virgas gather over Squaw Peak,
wondering when the enduring drought
would finally have its way.

I dropped the weight of my throat against the butter knife—
Take me, oh take me!
& belly-crawled toward the moon’s more patient love.
Now nothing shall cloud my edge—
not my torn shirt,
nor the bullhorns of dreamless sleep—
not the prison ships or imaginary islands they seek.

Galway, our dagger at nightfall
is only as dull as our last line of sight
toward which we aim the awl
that we might finally bleed only light.

Soliloquy / Francis Judilla

My car won’t start,

Zoyers and Roguszys* / Deborah Kelly

Reach a hand into sleep
its wild ferment
where animalcules effervesce
sour and sweet
a firmament bubbling
You can skim its shallow
you can eat its fathomless
but drink the barley malt of song
a repertoire of realms
where you have not hidden
where you dance holding hands
where words too embody
zoyers and roguszys
alongside all the gods
of honey-wine

[Kicks] / Rachel Cualedare

The Sea, the Sea, the Beautiful Sea / Corinne Walsh

I can do without the ocean.
Nor do I need to visit the sea.

I’ve sat by the ocean, and I’ve swum in the sea
enough to know an ocean lives inside of me.

My mind has been in an early morning fog 
and calamities surge beneath my skin,

but I don’t ever have to see the ocean
or admire the sea to know how it feels to be free.

I can eat a filet of cod for a taste of the ocean
or crack open a lobster to relish the sea.

My devotion doesn’t require nearness to set sail,
if I crave the ocean breezes it’s not out of need.

Casting /  Scott Williamson

Prepare the ground 
with brown sugar
to attract ants.
Keep adding sweets
until you are 
ringed by the 
colony. To the 
queen, plea for
absolution. Lay down
your wood sprite 
crown. Perform the
safety dance. Recruit
a chorus to 
join the cicadas.
Crescendo as the
keynote of the
universe (it’s B-flat)
stops upstaging the
bugs. Now your
troupe is ready
to prance. Buzz
your wings, six-
legged hummers, devour 
the avian nectar.

Don’t forget your
baton. Flick it 
like a wand.
Cast your favorite
Kafka opera. Diversify
the ensemble with
insects from every
hierarchical order. Also,
spiders. The Queen
of the Night’s
Three Ladies are
dragonfly, mantis, moth. 
If it’s not
evening, call the
royal’s understudy. Listen:
they sing descants 
only larvae comprehend.
Enlist the menagerie
of winged fellow
travelers to spin
circles of fifths
while buzzards soar
backwards, angels of 
history flying tail-
first into the 
cyclone whipped up
by molting arthropods. 

Day 14 / Poem 14

This morning, Autumn / Tameca L Coleman

This morning, Autumn
shows a little leg, gold-orange
like the early sifting towards moonlight.
She scatters herself over the path
twirling in waves as the wind 
tickles soft blankets
out of the trees. 
I put my nose to the wind
for her perfume. She says, “Not yet
but soon,” and lulls me to sleep
with the evening’s cricket songs.

Jubilate Felis Aurantiacus Catus. (Part 1, in progress)  / Christina Daub

After Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno” 

For I will consider my cat Jelly, emissary of the goddess Nyx, 

           daughter of Hypnos, niece of Morpheus 

                                                                 elegantly curled into herself

doing the work of the other world. 

                                                           And when she wakes, pads sprightly

across wooden floors, tail curving toward the tip 

                                             a question mark ringed in stripes 

                of marmalade and furred snow.

                            See how she turns her head to wait, widens her citrine eyes, 

                                          considers the light,     leaps

For she will settle on your lap facing

           toward you for affection or away, your protector

For she can purr, knows when to comfort, when to allay

               For she will pounce when she wants to play      stretch like sun 

                       over the sky, yawn like the moon 

                                announcing the day 

       For she can thread through standing photographs

                    weaving an angel’s trail, can jump onto

       a back, hitchhike her way across a four-walled world,

                               curl around my neck rendering me happily immobile 

           For I miss her as I pack, before I even go away.

For she can preen her Renaissance ruff, a courtier, a courtesan,     a queen

    For her pristine paws hide all pink jelly beans

   For she can climb into the clouds & hang by her claws

                     For her hunter’s nose sniffs what any wind brings

      For her velvet ears hear symphonies of birds no one else can hear

                                             stealthy as an apricot ripening on a tree

            For she she is cinnamon, caramel, sunrise, creamsicle, pumpkin, carrot cake & buttercream

For she can swing that tail like no other cat, gives back those stolen 

                  Jelly Roll Morton tunes, jaunts a little jig to “Tom Cat Blues,”

                         a twitchy tail trilling the wriggle before     the pounce

                Jellicle cat, her tabbiness supreme, striped awning on a warm July day,

                                                 tiger cub, praline 

In Flagstaff /  Clint Frakes

              Monday:
Four-year-old boy leaps up & down on the red brick wall
           in the front yard, yelling,
                      Blue sky! Blue Sky! Blue sky!

                Friday:
FOR RENT sign on the wall
      next to a rain-soaked sneaker &
                  plastic dinosaur.

You Call This Love? / Francis Judilla

The beating heart, temple

Physio / Deborah Kelly

The creature called experience breathes me into her lungs and I have been inspired,
passed through alveoli into venules and capillaries, into hemoglobin.
(For one’s head to be visited by the moth of an idea, too, is like inspiration)
We pump liberated plasma. One’s crepuscles exchange fluids.
I need to look out the creature’s eyes. That’s why.

[Those symbols] / Rachel Cualedare

Poems Without Birds / Corinne Walsh

I dare you to find one that doesn’t
just take off on the wings of words, 
a poem 
that doesn’t just twitter at the sky.
Poems without birds travel much slower.
Step much lower, their earthbound 
aspirations forging a path through 
a pathless woods.
             Poems without birds 
sometimes need us to carry them 
and when they find their way into our pockets
we tend to forget them until much later 
we find them crumpled
and shrunken in the laundry:
forgotten and deformed after the fact
newly minted and maybe a mystery, 
paper roadkill hiding in the lint trap
like the remains of old sales receipts
               for things we no longer possess.

René without a Hammer /  Scott Williamson

(after René Chard, 1907-1988)

1. 
Red caravan horseshoe

         beside the basket

                my Pierrot head

           on the knife

2. 
           Reverse the pendulum

dial silent walker

           granite step casts

fallen on imitation

           gone its load

iron
        nail 
           useless 

        wooden 

hammers

        point 

3. 
        Pure waves    seek    catharsis

           on a corpse

dead limbs  wild        man-child       eyes

           walking the habitable      pier in illusion

hear         the weeping                heed the sea

Day 13 / Poem 13

shots in Broomfield (Sept 12, 2024) / Tameca L Coleman

we considered past and future ghosts
as the emergency lights 
flashed the treatment rooms to alertness
and then calmed 
to a twitching pulse  
green and darkness in turn 
over tables 
where waiting people 
lay face down
in cradles.

the lights
were telling us 
to shirk our contentedness 
and competencies
because to look good on paper
doesn’t mean per say, right,
let alone true, 
let alone safe.

proof be told in the text
from California a coworker
received and repeated loudly 
many times over
that the eclipses 
in our morning cups
predicted, by their revolver-shaped handles,
another one, but not really close
and “no one got hurt, i don’t think?”

small talk in the break room
and i am just trying to wash my hands
because in other rooms we are paid
to deliver comfort partitioned
from the whole wide world.

the bright lights
have made me late. 
eleven after our start time

becomes fifteen. i’ll be working
through lunch, then. 

when we turn to face the ceiling,
i cover the receiver’s eyes.
the green light is still blinking.

the news confirms what we saw
in our dark cups, and that texting friend,
because when it bleeds, it leads.
the flashing lights,
and the woman yelling gunshots in the breakroom
bust through the treatment room door

and all our Denver cellphones
ring an emergency alert
louder than any ring tone–
but it says:

This is only a TEST
alert. NO ACTION
IS NEEDED.
This is a TEST.

LATE / Christina Daub

The way a cat pads across an upright piano, 
dusk lowers the lid on day. You look up 
from your desk and notice outside 
the bamboo has lost its shades,
the slender trunks, the thousand tapered 
papery flags now blank, another screen.
In the distance barred owls who-who 
who-who. There you are in glass light, 
a light you flip on and off, learning 
to see yourself as others see you—
saying what’s expected when you need 
to fit in or what’s surprising 
to entertain, while the other you, the real 
you, wanders the earth ellipsing 
the sun with no sense of separation 
or need, beyond time or even desire 
at last to turn it all off and go to sleep.

The Light Has Turned /  Clint Frakes

I wanted to write a political poem,
              but there was olive chaparral.
I wanted an epiphany,
              but dawn peeked over limestone hills.
I thought I’d express some anger,
              but my jawbone met September breeze.
I considered a lament,
              but black coffee awaited.
Later, resentment rounded the corner,
              but heaps of icy starlight  
                         marauded my condo.
In giving water to the tree,
              I measured my purple heart
                         & summoned long-awaited rain.

I long ago understood that one must be half-broken
to love wisely, & each day I quietly break,
                         so there can be no more poverty.
“What have you made today?”
              my inner supervisor says,
                         so I can measure an idea
of a man’s worth again.

I left prints without making the world worse.
My eyes made light without me knowing.

& the shapes of things gathered
              in my synapses as I studied the day’s haul:

                         riverglint & fernglow–
                         milktongue & walkalong.

Each night I watch what the faces say to the cameras as
I open bills & count coins–
              & there is much to be done from the floor to the roof.

I take another night-walk through town with my boy.

My feet are the color of the darkness,

he says,
              pointing to his black socks under summer flip flops.

I find my life is wrapped among many stones,
              leaves & songs that all make a trail.
                         & no one can measure what I’ve made.
              but for the eddies of memory.

I have pulled splinters from the thumbs of my boys
              & picked herbs for their lungs—
That we greeted the waves of dusk and smiled
              at the old lady with the dog
                         in a knitted sweater
                         is enough.

And then to wrangle a meal at the end of the day
              & breathe in full the last leaves of summer
                         as the world rises and falls to rhythms
              we only pretend to know.  
There are things still to be built &
many changes to see.

Yes, I have made little to nothing today, but I sing to it anyway.

With its billion suns in the feathers of night,
              this world answers every question with dawn.
                         but still my flowers go unnamed.  
& the hour will not stop  
              for me to know them any better.  

Unseen (or so they say)  / Francis Judilla

Omit the self. No, really:

Dharma / Deborah Kelly

❍ one who falls to the ground must reach toward the sky to stand up ––Dogen

know this

so you can get up

❍ the mountains are walking and the ground is suffused with sky ––Dogen

[Tribute] / Rachel Cualedare

Ruined / Corinne Walsh

One moment of hope 
poached like an egg
then swallowed whole,
like a dark sky
as the stars fade out:
in such a perfect way
love ruins each of us.
Our eyes searching the sky,
distance measuring time:
no amount of light warms us,
no drop of rain cools our desire.
We accept we will not recover.
Until the chilling instant 
we realize we must recover.
We can only recover.
And before we can resist,
the wind changes our course,
and we are suddenly flying away 
weightless and changed,
ablaze in ruin.

Melodram, an imaginary play /  Scott Williamson

Cast: One Performance Artist (PA)
Set: A room with a desk but no view; a chair, lamp, and sofa
        N.B. Can be arranged like “The Artist’s Bedroom” 
        Other props: bluetooth speaker, toothpaste, books, make-up

Act I

Performance Artist  (PA)  enters and crosses to the desk. 
Sits and resumes writing sketching dozing

The speaker plays piano music by Phillip Glass. 

PA stops. Looks out. Slowly rises from desk. Vogues for a photo shoot.

PA begins murmuring, thinking aloud but barely audible. 
Obstreperous cackles punctuate the indecipherable monologue.

Expressionist lighting changes with PA’s pace and voice. Channel Hitchcock
As PA’s thoughts and memories align, their voice gains clarity, slowly crescendoing into a literary reading. 

        (Use Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, A Confederacy of Dunces, anything by Dickinson,                 Whitman, Madonna, or Boy George.)

PA improvises a segue from the excerpt into a song, dance or master-class.

Blackout interrupts PA. 

End of Act 1.

Act II

PA mimes Puccini’s Tosca, Act III, as Mario, a painter and political prisoner, and anticipatory plagiarist of Florestan.

The desk and chair from Act I may remain for the upcoming letter scene, but are not necessary.
        Starlight is not necessary. 
        Neither is a practical firing squad. 

        The jailor is imagined. 
        Tosca is imagined. 
        The final leap from Castel Sant’Angelo may or may not occur. 

PA plays the part as a melodramatic tenor in a silent-film opera, until

music resumes from where it left off in Act I, slowly coming into the foreground over an 8” count. Music lingers for 13,” and fades out with the lights over 15” until 

Final blackout.

Note to the actor: At the end of the drama, Cavaradossi’s death should be played straight.  
Avoid stock gestures or funny faces. Rip out the audience’s hearts with your eyes and voice.

Day 12 / Poem 12

The lemon balm wants to be outside / Tameca L Coleman

The lemon balm wants to be outside.
The yucca plant wants to be outside.
The yarrow wants to be outside.
The hyssop wanted to be outside.
The yam will want to be outside.

The tomatoes and the eggplant
and the basil and three sisters
press against the window.
They fill it. They are looking
for their way out.

I am a gardener now.

Sometimes I do not realize my scent
and it is strong.

I have a strong sense of sun. Like plants
an invitation of light
rides lines through the floating dust,
and I uncover my head, peeking
out into the room.

In the morning, I am sun warmed juniper
crushed between
two fingers

and a moldering inclination—sugar
damage, sure. Sour some,
three-day musk.

This

through the house, puttering about,
leaving chores
undone.

Much of living seems moving
this thing to that place
and I’m tired of it.

I think maybe I can start over,
box up the apartment and reopen
each box as if it’s my first time home.

But I stuff scattered envelopes
into a drawer, and consider
whether I will go outside
this time.

The cacophonous robins
are close to the windows.
They will not stop chirping.
My head grows louder
with their sound.

The whole wide world is noise!
The robins get closer and louder.

The microwave’s door is broken.
The dresser drawers continually roll open.
The UPS person forced the lock off the gate.

I have turned the music on, a drone,
and the neighbors stomp around and yell,
cut through the wall of sound, drop heavy
things directly overhead.

Wake up!
Come out!
Are you home?
We are alive,
are you?

Their cat is galloping across the ceiling
and yowling through the vents, “Hey!
I hear you down there. Who you?”

The windows are low light already,
but I brought numerous new plants
to add to the jungles growing
on the windowsills.

The loud barbecue outside, their chair backs
turned towards my windows—
My jungle, a pseudo barrier
that does not stunt the party’s noises
or the smoky smells and laughter
which remind I have often enjoyed
being in the company of strangers
and new friends.

Guardians   / Christina Daub

Praise to the angel who stopped my husband from going
to his usual Tuesday meeting the morning of 9/11

and to the one who ordered me to duck at the Shell
station when the sniper pulled into the adjacent Safeway lot,

and to all who kept my child alive, when there were guns
smuggled into lockers at his school. How to repay whatever 

unseen force steps in so we can live another day?
How will we see the signs they leave when we prefer 

to ignore what we cannot explain, when we’ve built 
our lives from science, empirical proofs like thorns

on roses because we’re told there is no garden
beyond the veil, no veil at all or rosy other worlds.

We’re center stage, too blind to see, too serious
to believe in them. We do not hear them whisper

from the crease in the veneer. Think of them,
the multitudes extending all their hands, shifting

foot to foot, feet to feet, while they attempt to learn 
our lines, what we will need, waiting in the wings.

Real Cities XIV /  Clint Frakes

I remain the most indispensable character of my dreams,
mixing breath with stars, hungry for the orange skies &
broad-shouldered plateaus that teach elk who they are.
I am not lonely or alone, just set aside
for a bit to take teachings from more primary forces.
It’s too late for me to buy a good reputation,
so I walk to a familiar wine haunt.
The slab that I sit on still holds the day’s sun &
fountains splash & pink-haired women sing.
The final light spills itself over the patio &
I finally know my origin story.
It has something to do with a supernatural fish.
I tell lies to the spiders after I kill them—
Coyote did this! 
He also created the world that was to tired
to emerge of its own accord.
His joke will always be on you.
I’d rather begin the day building a purple house of trees  
so that cicadas erupt every hour in applause.
It’s always open mic night when I go around &
I flatfoot my way back to the
hotel through a lot of broken-bottles
& nodded-out drunks & junkies
that have finally stopped arguing with each other.
They call this Albuquerque & I failed
to put a healing hand on any of them. 

Sickening  / Francis Judilla

How sweet the sound

Visitors / Deborah Kelly

Act so there is no use in a center.  ––Gertrude Stein

Disassemble incoherence, invite Cage to 
find pause on your living room couch.
At the table, Carson will point out inadequate boats, 
boats that fail on the sea while she butters her toast.
This is a problem that will not resolve,
an early matinee and a raft washed up with corpses.
You cannot solve it. But you must try,
while starvation and Sunday lunches collide.

Can we ever be good people?
Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum.
I doubt therefore I think therefore I am.
Thank you, Descartes.
Life loose at both ends and the middle,
unwillingly unwound, willing ourselves to stay 
the duration in hesitation,
while the dog watches and feels fine.
You must let starvation and Sunday lunches collide.

Note: “Cage” is John Cage, the composer. “Carson” is Anne Carson, the poet.

[In a high register] / Rachel Cualedare

Early September Cento / Corinne Walsh

With lines taken from Tameca L Coleman, Chistina Daub, Clint Frakes, Francis Judilla, Deborah Kelly, Rachel Cualedare, Nichols Skaldetvind, Corinne Walsh, Scott Williamson

There is a rhythm                                                                            
All this language _ my dear neighbors                                            |
Moldering whatever grows                                                          
Pilgrims to the end, always restored by the merit of plum wine     
Between the bridges                                                                        
The valley announcing your return                                                  
Wishing there were less of the world                                               
No wait, that’s not fair to say                                                            
Stop the clock                                                                                   
Lightning struck awhile ago                                                             
The centuries-old greed for land                                                       
Fixation Strata                                                                                   
The sun is setting through the riverbank trees                                 
It is difficult to express much more than gratitude                           
There’s a hunger within                                                                      
Life rolls less on spectra and more on color wheel                           
Like a coin from a magic trick                                                           
Think of all the places you’d never have seen                                  
Like how water falls into itself                                                            
The slowness of change                                                                    
Brilliant as brilliance                                                                            
When paper maps ceased to be necessary                                      
Each step implying the next  

Quartet movements  /  Scott Williamson

(for any combination of voice, instrument, or mime)

I. Maestoso – Allegro. 

One must have a mind for it, as observation is preliminary to the end of all exploring to find the peak eclipsed. The blue flowers, perfect as romance in fall. In the arid garden only the fennel is fragrant, unbruised. 

There are other scales to range, hands in contrary motion wizarding the keys 
       quick as we’d like his misanthropic leitmotif to leave.

       They return wearing different costumes, rented, velvet, tulle. Like a Tchaikovsky waltz, she said his pick-up line was smooth as. 

                                                       Let’s dance.

II. Scherzo – Energico. 

Hurtling in dysfunction’s maelstrom a cliff’s edge breaks the fourth wall depending on who’s directing we were talking about the zooming cats and I ran like
       an Anglophile on Adderall at Royal Ascot 
       overtaking an excess of A-types. 

Meanwhile the stadium was avalanching and you were going to 
       bollocks me over my top hat with a shepherd’s pipe.

Presto su, Mario! Then you said, I do. And also with you, I replied.
       ‘Till the seas go dry. I love you. 

                            Please don’t cry. 

(repeat ad lib.)

III. Adagio – Più mosso – Lento amoroso.

Close listening to the last act again, dancing charades in slow-mo, aching as an old  wooden bridge, stilling the candle flames with ascending octaves. 
       If it was easy anyone could do it. 

       You can hear the flutes piping ephemera 
   As birds wing westward  
the holograph portal breathes like bellows

Look it’s Eros hiding.        between the rests

ringed with      thousand-fold      love motives

the gods are      no less       relentless 

(Yes, we’re lingering. 
It’s the slow movement.)
[2’16.5” pause before the Finale]

IV. Finale – Poco adagio – Andante mosso – Allegro.

Is this not how you’d like to go, Gustav? Reclining
on the Lido, crying after youth eyeing 
twelve Nereids’ water-writ graves

A solo dancer, serenissima, gliding
from lagoon to canal atop the white owl 
sound of a glockenspiel, dipping,
bobbing between the sick sea’s strings

Va bene, Signore, slipping away
misterioso loon skimming 
the sea-star’s ripple as finger-
tips barely brush my beloved’s skin

(Coda)

Ciao, caro
Addio, amore mio
senza rancor.

Day 11 / Poem 11

“…reflecting a bit of pale sun”* / Tameca L Coleman

Grandma waves me off when I ask
if I can interview her for a class assignment.
“Just make something up,” she says.

I am so hungry for my family’s stories,
I have waxed pestilent, pen and journal in hand,
begging for impossible windows to fly open
out of every type of locked up past.

When my great grandmother was dying,
there was this quiet way Grandma,
jammed her hands into her jeans’ pockets,
and squeezed her chin down
over her vocal cords
to hold her breath and heart
there for a while.

It felt like a kindness, even as she said,
“it’s too late, ‘Meca.” and she didn’t cry.
Not then.

I thought that if I could sit by Great Grandma for a while,
some story would come. Her mouth would open,
and she would recognize me as me,
and she would deem me worthy
of a some telling I could hold on to.

I was just one of the kids who came over sometimes
out of what seemed like hundreds of us.

We sat at the kids’ table on holidays, and ran around in her wild yard,
wearing ourselves out until it was time to eat.
We’d stuff ourselves on all the sweet and savory things
that now feel like family.

When Great Grandma was gone, we didn’t gather anymore.
And I asked Grandma for her stories, too.
I wanted to know her stories and Grandpa’s.
I wanted to know how they saw
my mother when she was a little girl.

I found out posthumously that she used to race cars.
This was the grandmother I didn’t get to know,
before mens’ many tyrannies; before Vietnam;
before so much she must have sworn to keep silent

for better and for worse.

And it made sense then, why she loved so much
our visits to Meridian Speedway. How she smiled
and yelled for all our favorite drivers. And how we
smiled and yellowed, too, tipsy on the residue of her joy.

*from the Prologue of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder

Border Crossings   / Christina Daub

Look back at the map of your life
the points where  you might have disappeared,
been disappeared, not knowing danger 
until you were in it—no phones, no Internet, 
just guidebooks and wanderlust, 
too young to know better.
Think of all the places you’d never have seen
if you knew then what you know now.
Are you worse off for it?
Will you tell your stories as adventures 
or cautionary tales?
If I’d had a daughter who went where I went, 
I would not sleep at night.
I would be texting every angel  
to guide her safely home.
Though if she’d been like me, 
she’d never mention it 
until long after, and maybe not even then—
these risks she’d taken, the life-threatening 
situations it’s perhaps better
I didn’t know, I who gave her life
and wanderlust to begin with.

What the River Dreams /  Clint Frakes

We carry a tune & often desert it
on high plains—the salt & juice
of this life turns amid light & shadow. 
It won’t matter for long
what you felt & where—
like how water falls into itself,
bluer for the turn.
Maybe you finally had enough, 
yet the road to which you’ve sewn 
yourself touches what you never could
have loved alone.
What this river dreams
is what I long to say.

Wait for me  / Francis Judilla

In spite of opposition,
the autumn skies
collapse. No time,
or so my watch informs,
no time to ponde

In spite of opposition,
the autumn skies
collapse. No time,
or so my watch informs,
no time to ponde
the inconsequential
passingof the casually mundane.

How subtle,
the lifestyle creep
of the indifferent, broken
of the well-meaning.

Ragged days 
run their course:

the slowness of change
does not escape, merely
shifts into the unrecognized.

What a beautiful sunset
or so I would say to you,
here in the passing deat
of days long overdue.

 

Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe / Deborah Kelly

[Day song] / Rachel Cualedare

Wild Hare / Corinne Walsh

Just by bounding
the rabbit makes her way,
on impulse or forethought
it’s hard to say.

Her haunches burst full tilt, 
in a blur of movement –scuttling
from point A to wherever
the plan only, go!

She bounds. She springs. She turns,
and when she lands
it’s in the place she was meant to
from the place she came.

In an unexpected, noiseless
explosion of mottled fur,
she zigs and zags as if following
prescribe lines –inured.

My old slow eyes can hardly follow
as she bounds her path
in less time than it takes for me to ask, 
“Where did she go?”  

I envy the brown blur,
that impalpable instant
when she chooses to go.
And then goes.

I envy her impeccable stillness,
the power that owns her,
and her new starting point
–just before she goes again.

Heliocentric  /  Scott Williamson

                                                         O

s      u      n            f      l      O      w      e      r

         S      t      e      m             m      i      n      g

                                    U      n             d      e      r

k      e      S      T      r        e      l      s

                   w      I      n               t      e      R               i      n      g

                                       s      o      u      t      h

s      A      g      e             a      N      d              s      e      e      d      s

        f   O   r               i      n      c      e      n      s      e

                                           a      U      L      d

                                                            a      h      e      a      D

B      e      n                     d

                     b      O      w

                                        b      R      e      a      k

r      E                    b      u      i      l      d

t h e                  s      u      n.         c      h      a      r      i      o      t

       f o r                           I      C      A      R      U      S

                         b              l      o      o      m      i      n      g

Day 10 / Poem 10

“Wood from a burl is prized by woodworkers for its intricate design, and some will pay top dollarfor it.” / Tameca L Coleman

To builders, burls are termed imperfections
strange, darkened circles inside the woodgrain
were once the base connections of branches
that found themselves surrounded by light wood
by the same trunk from which they sprouted, cut
for another purpose, perhaps, or same.

There are so so many uses for wood
[but do we always know our purposes?]
Sometimes shelter, and often by nature
changing things without meaning to. A tree
is fifty percent of what we are. Burls
form on the outside of trees, reacting
to stress, protective, scar-like, lifesaving
healing marks from which a new branch might grow.

Cuttings:

• will this tree form burls?
• let us consider burls more
• and more
• we are fifty percent of what a tree is

Quote: naturemuseum.org, “Why do trees have knots?”, Chicago Academy of Sciences; Author:
Kyle Shibner, Nature Museum Volunteer

A burl can do more than seal off a wound like a scar. Redwoods use burls for self- defense like other trees, but            redwood burls can actually sprout and create new redwood trees. This is an important part of the redwood cycle: if a redwood thinks that it may die from injury or disease, the redwood creates burls that can sprout many more redwoods in its place.

It’s knot not [sic] al smooth sailing once the ree as protected itself with a burl. Wood from a burl is prized by woodworkers for its intricate design, and some will pay top dollar for it. Burl hunters use saws to hack te burl off, giving the tree a fresh wound. Poachers will even steal redwood burls from national forests, resorting, at times, to killing the tree.

Without a Map  / Christina Daub

When paper maps ceased to be necessary,
I left them in the car door pockets, folded, faded
and wouldn’t let anyone remove them.

My father used to say if he taught me anything,
it would be how to read a map, to know your territory,
be able to retrace a path through dark woods.

This is how to remember landmarks, the difference 
between byways & roads, and how to use 
the scale to measure time and distances. 

On the morning he drove me to college in DC 
to begin freshman year, we barely spoke.
The car had broken down twice on the way

and he needed to get back to New York City
for work the next day. As we neared DC,
after ten hours in the Oldsmobile wagon, 

he said, find New York Avenue on the map.
Follow the PO-TO-MAC, rhyming it with 
Fotomat. It’s the Potōmac I said, lengthening 

the second syllable a few seconds too long. 
Ja, he said, I’m sure ven za Indians vehr here 
zay called it the PotŌmac in a lockjaw

I’d never heard him use and we laughed so hard 
we missed the exit, making me wish we could 
turn around, lead-foot the pedal, and go home.

Years later, working at National Geographic,
I’d go to lunch detouring through the third floor 
to pass the mappies, as we called them, 

the cartographers bent in silence, one to a desk, 
careful maps spread out in front of them
like prayer books or illuminated manuscripts,

pens and pencils and rulers, compasses
all pointing toward New York where I’d go,
map in hand, if my father were still there.

Thalia from Customer Service /  Clint Frakes

I always thought I could do stand-up and connect with people
that have been drinking on Friday nights.
I have a hundred customer service stories, like the time I got
a date with Thalia & a full refund for my garage door opener
in just 32 minutes (20 of them on hold).
I expected her to have some kind of ivy on her head, 
or Roman laurel & probably a robe. Maybe her narrow foot
would be resting on a block of marble when I went
to pick her up. I’m not beyond staring at a Coke machine or
painting mustaches on Cosmopolitan models for hours—
but when I saw her, I froze & wondered,
  What bullshit line did Zuess use on your mother, like
  “I am the God of gods!” or something?
In any case, I summoned her & her joyous boots & crazy masks
& we went berry-picking in the canyon after a ham sandwich
& some IPAs. She’s the kind of girl I would’ve asked to the prom
‘cuz she thought I was funny in algebra class.
I made a pun on copulation when two giant dragonflies buzzed
into the classroom, locked in coitus. Next thing I know she’s
reading my poems & my only goal is to make her laugh
or go wow. We got hot dogs every day after school
at the mini-mart. That’s when I noticed that everywhere she walked,
things came into bloom & honeybees and hummingbirds
fluttered in her wake. She whispered something to a waiter
once & he wrote a play about Aristophanes & then his skin became
vibrant and rosy. Next thing I know, people are getting  
into line for her advice & I was getting kind of hooked on her mojo
so cut to the front. I was lion-faced & bold about it & painted a
Night Blooming Cereus on my t-shirt to get her attention—
praying she had an opening for the afternoon of the 23^rd.
It seemed like there were always cherubs hovering around her,
so privacy was at a premium. There were plump, low-hanging
grapes and datura blossoms in front of her booth & it became
difficult to see her away from the rigamarole.
One night I spotted her at the laundromat with her 
ventriloquist dummy & knew that was my chance to cozy up. 
She offered me a fig, but I asked for a date. I told her,

   All atoms are liars because they make up everything.

She liked the pre-Socratic stuff.
She made a Hamlet pun while kicking around Yorick’s skull
like a soccer ball & I laughed so hard I hit the floor.
We talked about the good old days, hanging out with the naiads
& river gods, shooting dried peas at the lowest deities.
I finally kissed her on the teeter totter and she immediately
changed her name to “Holly.” I finally met her dad, but under
unfortunate circumstances, as I had crashed his Lincoln
into Lake Stymfalia after an epic day opening packages at Target
& getting refunds at customer service (a racket she invented).
O Thalia (I mean Holly), for you I would quit my job at the
Ignorance Factory & start a kelp-only diet, 
campaign for Napolean & sit under a tree 
until I knew something.

You Call This Love?  / Francis Judilla

An extension of heart,
a mixture, disgrace
in the form of pursuit:

walk down rain-trodden
lanes in lieu of connection,
each step implying the next,

(how heavy the burden)

pursue the cycle of infinity,
a solid mass imposing a will,
sickening a thoughtless dream.

A weight beyond its years,
resonant and true,
here under the guise of love.

Now Where / Deborah Kelly

Where am I now?

Grasses softening, and
all the wild asters, their nubs past ripe.
Woody plants, scents of sumac, 
the sweetening twigs of blackberry.

All the birds relax,
less frantic about mornings.

Oh, I feel rest coming,
if only because I’m still awake, very late.

Summer has exhausted us
with its record-hot light.
We could hear photons circle nuclei,
the buzz of atoms.

Now, I want to roll on the lawn like a labrador,
edge up to the oak, curl up to sleep
at its root crown.
In the leaves’ release.

[Could listen] / Rachel Cualedare

My Cartesian Coordinates / Corinne Walsh

          indicate a single point in space/ represented as P = (a, b, c)

                      shutting off the lights tonight
in the kitchen
                                   I’m floating like a satellite
moving through 
                                                         the universe unchecked.

             Guided by the glow
                         of tiny neon lights: the clock   (point a)  on the microwave
                                                           Glowing green
      the stove dashboard (point b) with its illuminated
                                                                            icons, beaming light
                                (point c) the kitchen sink
                         filled with darkness under dim
                                stars shining brightly outside the window, 
                                         millions and billions of miles away from here.
                          Here?
My exact location currently uncertain,         Parts of me
                                                              adrift in space ( points a, b, and c )
                          I’m taking up space but I’m not sure where I exist:
                    Here
        Out there       
                      under     near    or     far

                                               marking an unknown place
                                               from an uncharted hemisphere
                                                                                        beneath my equator.

Do-It-Yourself Ten-Card Tarot Reading  /  Scott Williamson

• Draw 10 cards from the deck, laying them out one-by-one in the order drawn*

• Pick 6 end-words (for the pretentious like I, these are called teuletons)

• Select 2 poetic feet (These words are all fun to say: iamb, dactyl, anapest, trochee…)

• Choose 2 rhyming words (elation/vacation: Like Sondheim, I prefer multisyllabic pairs)

• Pair one word with each card. 

Here’s an example: 

10 Cards*: 1. Tower, 2. Ace of Wands, 3. VIII of Swords, 4. IX of Cups, 5. VI of Wands, 6. Justice, 7. VII of Pentacle, 8. The Chariot, 9. The Hanging Man, 10. Strength

6 Teuletons: dovetailing, foraging, butler, harangue, dilemma, boomerangs

2 Poetic feet: dactyl, spondee

Rhyming pair: delectable, undetectable

Card/Word pairings:

The Tower dilemma
Ace of spondee Wands
VIII delectable Swords
IX undetectable Cups
VI Wands foraging
Justice dovetailing 
VII Pentacle boomerangs
The dactyl Chariot
The Hanging Man’s butler
Strength harangue

*The 10 cards refer to the following positions or states of being:
1. The Questioner’s [your] Present Position
2. Immediate Influence
3. Destiny
4. Distant Past
5. Recent Past
6. Future Influence
7. The Questioner’s Perspective
8. The Questioner’s Environment
9. Inner Emotions
10. Final Result

• Weave all these elements into a poem, or make your own rules and do it your way:

At present, the tower dilemma
influences the ace of spondee
wands immediately. The goal
is eight delectable swords,
finding the nine undetectable
cups from a distant past.
Recently, six wands foraging
influenced dovetailing justice.
Seven pentacles boomerang
back to the flying dactyl chariot.
Mourning with the hanged man’s
butler we harangue strength
from this absurdist spread

Day 9 / Poem 9

A Music Playlist Cento – September 8, 2024 / Tameca L Coleman

I want my honey –
Please give a warm welcome
to this current mood.
I’m fighting for your life
[but] ain’t no words coming through.
I’ve been looking for one good reason
but I haven’t found it yet.
I’m sitting in the kitchen sink,
daydreaming disaster.
Wrap me in your arms. I can’t feel it
but rock me in your arms.
Keep on movin’. Don’t stop, No!
Kiss every comma in your checklist!
Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!
When the night rolls in, waiting for you,
and I choose you when the night rolls in,
endless visions, bad decisions
still I’m thinking more.
There’s another line for everyone else,
the line for me and you.
I love you so much,
yeah,
I’m just like you.

Sources:
Tosca (Honey – Azoia Dub)
Okay Kaya (Mother Nature’s B**tch)
James Brown (Fight Against Drug Abuse)
Bobby McFerrin (Yes, You)
The Cure (1015 on a Saturday Night)
Modest Mouse (Doing the Cockroach)
Yo La Tengo (Some Kinda Fatigue)
Sylvan Esso (Coffee)
Soul II Soul (Keep On Movin’)
Q and Not U (Soft Pyramids)
Aphex Twin (54 Cymru Beats)
Slow Dive (Shanty)
Jane Weaver (Argent)
Marnanel (The Nonbinary Song)
Shabazz Palaces (Noetic Noiromantics)

Flying Point  / Christina Daub

   Walking the jagged edge    where the water 
meets the shore,     long strides on hard sand, 
     slow ones through soft,     the waves always 
different, always the same,     their clouds 
    of foam encircling your feet,      toes alive
  in the wetness, the cold,      the freedom
of sinking into the breathing    earth,
  what it gives and what it takes   away,
you, blustered by wind,    hair aflame, arms
  outstretched,   facing the sun  and its million
      glints blinking the   great eye    of the sea,
  you, in all that glory,    what will you    give
           back       to     all    of    this? 

Pool Privileges /  Clint Frakes

   for Stanley Kunitz

 I.

We were all told to know you, teacher of my teachers—
the lamentations & desires that summon mythical beasts
from the dark floors of pre-creation. 
In endless broad-leafed summers, we were boys in wet trunks
on salty docks under Haley’s Comet,  
her perihelion, & our joy of no school today. 
We found peace under the shingles of modest houses
and lilacs wafting from the front lawn.
This is when our women canned relish and bottled pears
& we, sticky with life, breathed in the rain
& breathed out these poems.

II.

If a man is just a name & some borrowed breath
arranged around the tailings of expired stars,
dreaming another Veronica, parakeet or Spanish olive,
why not bow to red rivulets of brandy & praise  
the warblers & wasps of September? 
None of this can be succinctly brought to reason or conclusion
& we all grow weary of gray presidents’ lifeless faces
& the pallid schematics of war.
If we cannot save the whales, we will not save ourselves.
Oh Stanley, I pierce the darkness and new beings appear!

 III.

A poet who does not lie is scarcely interesting,
and if he does not sell those lies—scarcely fed. 
These bones I lug around are the fruits of the sea  
and I am on my knees here—so womanly.
You knew the names of the domesticated flowers
in your Manhattan plot & we might never again
need an old Jew’s garden poems—
though I can hear the plaintive calls
of your wife and smell her oil paints
in your south room in the great August
of your long life.

IV.

I am not done with my changes either
& can’t fathom the siblings you lost
& what you thought after a century of phonemes & images
heaved on your back—how you straightened
your antennae amid all this just-passing-through.
I tend to read things backwards toward dawn,
like a magnetic anomaly where the ancient horny toad
makes all the rules—& the rogue languages. 
I am on the Board of Deviants with you—
the secret rooms where we disembody & finally
listen intelligently to the stars.
The stoma of the world will sing & legless soldiers
shall be returned whole,
but, the maestro was right:
sooner or later all things must be lovingly forsaken. 

V.

Like you, I have loved a woman & know all latitudes
by the way my senses gather around her cheekbones—
the rhythm of her hips as she walks alongside me
Later—it will get better— later,
said the queen of my dreams—
& the other far side of myself.
I need it to be later now.

VI.

Why do I still write—with no one listening?
I’ve all but stopped speaking for the same reasons—
& Cleopatra needs no more odes,
though her children were manacled and tortured
as sure as power’s reign ends. 
But for now it’s dust and wind & strictly theory
& imagination as my hands carve the moment. 

VII.

Yes, the poet stands for something more stout
than his own collar—or braid of hair. 
Or is it just another case of a boy saying,
Mommy, look at what I made!
So, I gather these little pine needles & marvel
at the cougar’s fresh wet prints,
the petroglyphs of hands, hands & more hands.
I will continue along the river
among the bird omens and ibis legs
as Dionysus dances away the fleeting moments—
all shaped by the women who have sat near me
and then walked away.

Coping Mechanism  / Francis Judilla

Todays goal is a 4%
increase in joy,
an optimization 
of sequential meaning
in broken glass
delirium .  I mean,
just face the truth:

The illusion of routine
is suffocating. This faux
structure we impose
upon ritual, goals,
habit, exercise, diet
time, perception,
love, meaning, joy.

Radically, ponder this:

Let wind flow
past river-bent
terrariums, a contained
world, unearned,
placed wholly within,

an enforcement 
of artificial meaning
given form, risen

 beyond the supposed grave.

Reflection / Deborah Kelly

This is not a hat box but a voice box
I carry by a string

Train on Track C
hat on my head
my cardboard luggage

In the tiny carriage privy
a glassless mirror with doubtful eyes
clearer than the one I’ve toted

(doubt’s important)

There all the lines from jaw to brow
refold all the words I’ve heard
among all the words I’ve spoken

[Squandered] / Rachel Cualedare

The breath that animates the trees

Detritus in the street: dry days
lent to brilliance

A beat inside the belly

Suspension at the apex of the span:
a thought’s worth of paces

The strain of one cricket

Sweet, sweet nothing

Repeat the course of plots
until it is a pattern

Not progress

Frankly stationary:
existing in nothing but season

Mud bird’s nest that’s been on the beam
two years

The span of a mind
is how long, really?

A day; engender a day

Pluviophilia / Corinne Walsh

Fuck these sunny days, joy 
is just too hard to sustain.

If I had a wish to make
my wish would be for it to rain

every day, and so often 
no one would complain.

Imagine the perfume of petrichor!
And the peaceful sound of rainfall.

Thunder and lightning would be overkill,
rain and wet would more than do.

Intermittent or downpour,
inconsistency is what I would adore. 

Drizzle, steady, or off-and-on all day
not hail, nor blizzards, just raindrops. 

Bring soft rains with gentle specks 
or make it bilious drops with fat clouds

to supply the wet. I could live happily
under such a pleasing parapet.

Keep your rainbows. 
I prefer the fog and mist. 

If only wishes did come true,
none of us would have to see
another sky of blue.

Fugue for Four Exes: Performance Score*  /  Scott Williamson

Soprano: < ! @ # ? ! > . . . ? ? . . . < ! ! > < $ ? > :||

Mezzo Soprano: + & # % { * * } % # & + . . . > !  > !  > :||

Tenor:  f f f f f  … [ ] $ $ $  … [ ] < ! ! >  … [ ] ? ? ?  :II

Baritone: . . . < < . . . + ? ? + . . . < < < . . . = ? = !  :||

Conductor: TACET :||

*Vocalists should begin in a circle facing one another. 
         The conductor remains silent and outside of the circle.

Vocalists are free to interpret each symbol or mark individually. For example, exclamation marks need not be uniform between the voice parts. Expletives welcome.

Vocalists are free to sing texts, syllables, non-verbals, and curses of their choosing

The first iteration of each individual line is independent, and should not be in sync. 
After the first iteration voice parts may align via parallel motion or in counterpoint.

All save the conductor may move freely around the space. 

Conclude by forming a tableau vivant, framing the Conductor, whose back is turned.

Repeat ad nauseam until each performer has exorcised their common ex, 
      the Conductor. 

Day 8 / Poem 8

There is something to be said about staying power / Tameca L Coleman

there is an energy a liminal space
that makes itself out of a fervent clutter

there is an energy as if every moment
is a commercial break but there is no break really

the message blares
rattles the brain limbo loudness echoing
rattles the body a message welling
a vasodilation

weakening the veins and arteries
til they splay and spider

hot cold hot cold
rattling out of us a need

of another something
we’re convinced we need
that we do not need

if we noise as the urban pigeons noise
use the city spikes,
placed under bridges
meant to deter

place nests
protected on the other side
living feeding our young

holding school. hold school. hold home.
hold against the ledge where spines become a safety

we laugh at the deterrent

hold the ledge against the city.
hold. hold it. as the passing cars exude their trouble.
and when the city sprays the undersides of bridges
displacing us, we start again, another

ledge, another space not yet coopted
always moving so often in-between
finding the limbos finding comfort
finding home

there is an energy that holds beyond the boundary
it is no matter what and just because
it is no matter what and rampant with life
like a river. like trees pressing
into the sky. our wings flapping just because that’s exactly what our wings are meant to do.

Roadside reverie  / Christina Daub

Commelina Communis,Asiatic dayflower, 
you are too beautiful to pull or eat,
wildly spreading your rounded 
indigo wings, daisy-yellow 
miniature stars, tromboning stamens, 
roadside where I weed. 
I already regret unbinding 
the white glories twined 
around the purple lobes hosting 
swallowtails and bees. How they beamed 
like newlyweds, the white trumpets 
and plum Buddleias, or as my neighbor 
informed me spiderwort 
and bindweed.

I Sought My Own Quiet News /  Clint Frakes

I sought my own quiet news before dawn today—
its eyelids and sentries—
the lavender truth of her wings.
An orange chorus of invisible finches erupted with the
late summer grass, freshly bent under the front
hoof of the dew-wet doe.
I heard the thunder last night & dreamed
under a billion cosmic fires—

raised a glass of water to the thinning darkness
& spoke the names of everyone that matters,
as the coil of the day started its hum.
I saluted something again before arranging
the messy truck of the day’s agreements.
The slow stir of the night relented
& I’ve yet to claim a thing
in this bountiful limn.

The discoveries that await remain unnamed.
The night-ghosts were benign & certain change
awaits my first turn. Birds set to leap south again,
leaving me to imagine old Mexico.
My arrow is aimed at odd words & secret places
amid the cinder-packed craters & gold savannahs
which elude the spin of my hands,
yet define their purpose.

I leave the house dark as & the eddies of breeze
keep the cypress dancing—wings enough for me
to master the hour. The anatomy of tile
& boards govern my nearly flawless walk—
that I be hollow enough today
to hold all the columns of Greece,

the great walls of wind & the geometry of the spider—
all to make what must be made.

This One Is For You  / Francis Judilla

How strange. This has yet
to
weigh me down, so much
so, that I remain

Untitled 1 / Deborah Kelly

Lunulae, even half-moons set.
For our passage,
I would overfill the phases.

And constellations­­––

To drip the ladle
and string the witless bow
its tipless arrow
above December.

On earth, we’ll hear
the wolves sing 
from a porch swing
or a ridgeline
and we can take that
song with us.

No more words stretched
out of shape to make
imaginary clothes
for a regular emperor.

But delicious, 
words born long or strange––
Lunulae. Lunula. Uñas.

Waning gibbous.

[Nothing it was] / Rachel Cualedare

Never mind

The past is clear

White moon

Boats in the imagination

 Just an interval

What is undone, undone

Shifts in the tone

Not to match

Nest of weeds in the dark

Cast it away

The space of sunset 

Nothing it was 

Nothing it will be

Manifestation of Trees / Corinne Walsh

With degrees just right at 77 Fahrenheit
I could not recall a more perfect autumn day.
Then our visit to the Raulston Arboretum
took an uphill turn at the weeping willows
when a woman came running down crying.
She’d lost her daughter in among the sea of trees.
She was inconsolable in her fear of loss
and barely able to speak more than plead.
Immediately we scrambled and dispersed
to search between the groves and separating paths. 
It wasn’t long before you found the child
hidden in the cluster of fruit trees we had passed. 
Smiling and cheerful as a blossoming bud, 
the little girl had no idea she had been lost.
Her mother scolded, “You must never ever,”  
as she grabbed her hand, and yanked it hard
to make her understand. Awkwardly,
we smiled and continued on our way 
turning off into the Japanese exhibit. 
That’s where I found her, fully grown, 
Lagerstroemia Fauriei, 
my beloved Japanese Crepe Myrtle:
at the height of beauty, yet calm and shady.
Bark like skin only stronger,
lean muscular limbs, so solid and serene, 
as if all my feelings for you 
had turned to seed and grown into a tree.

It’s such fun to say  /  Scott Williamson

Zoom, zoom, zoom!
Zoom carries wor
s like moo, 
zoo and oz; if you’re
in a meditative 
state there’s 
        om.

I can’t remember
the last time I meditated.
It was short-lived 
as good intentions,
my mind zooming 
this way and that
restless
        as electrons.

Is pure stillness possible?

I’ll zoom over to the lab
and ask the scientists
about perpetual motion 
speeding and careening
between atoms and sonatas.

Speed is highly valued elsewhere,
like sports, virtuosity and typing.
Also wireless connections
        which help Zoom.

It’s dizzying, this
maze of information
our digital oz
a zoo of virtual reality
that can’t replicate
the physics of the heart,
pulsing and singing
Ah, oh, oo
        OM.    

Day 7 / Poem 7

The tightening murder! / Tameca L Coleman

Crows’ urgent cacophony
in the trees. I have paused
long enough to see
their flapping wings
span the length
of a hawk’s balancing
over her fresh kill.

And on the street, a man waves
at the neighbor who is gardening
in dirt-stained gloves and a sun hat,
as he passes by on the sidewalk
across from me, chipper as the sun.

The neighbor nods, waves,
continues her work, digging
and pulling up weeds. And he
continues to walk up the street
towards home, I imagine,
or the park.

In the tree closest to us,
crows cinch a boundary
while the hawk pulls,
and releases entrails
from another bird.

She tugs at the innards
and lets them go,
looking in every direction,
wings like a shield against
the tightening murder.

They are so loud
and they flap
their wings
and the hawk
hesitates, clasps
her prey, tugs
and releases again
then flies
off the branch,
with tens of shadows
clipping her tail feathers.

The woman gardening pulls and pulls at the weeds.

East Berlin, 1984  / Christina Daub

Peeing Dream /  Clint Frakes

Having been dispossessed of my private room in the warehouse, I freaked out & like a neurotic cat peed in my buddy’s guitar. In fact, I blamed the cat. But they were on to me. “That’s no cat pee,” the boss said waving the lab report. “We’ve had it analyzed and know the peer was at least 160 lbs.”  I knew it was just a matter of time before they busted me. The victim was an untalented balladeer who I’d once unintentionally slighted at a poetry reading. I packaged the outgoing motors and blades over the ensuing days, stranger than a delusional Raskolnikov in my warehouse boots and colorless frock. I passed the poet from time to time at the dock & would say, “I hope they catch that peer! Did they find him yet?” Luckily the mafia came crashing into the joint in a bizarre deus ex machina, popping out of file crates sent from corporate headquarters across the lot, shooting the place to bits with Tommy guns. I was frightened, but relieved to escape the compound amid the chaos, posing as a terrified Swedish building inspector.

Mixed Signals  / Francis Judilla

Wait.
Remain.
Try again.
Convince yourself.
Demand more than this.
How quaint, a sly kindness.
And yet, peace survives.
Forgive yourself.
Become less.
Stay calm.
Wait.

Tricked  / Deborah Kelly

we do step into the same river twice
if water runs incidental to rocks 
that shape its currents
           rock   water   barefoot
slippery every time
and colorful are bruises

the trick is not minding it hurts
said T.E. Lawrence     leaning on his serene
one hand in candle flame 
in his clean desert

I’ve stepped in one river
more than twice 
same submerged boulders streaming
their algal life under lower light

the trick is not minding it

especially if the slippery is deliberate
which the rock is not and the water is not
but the bare foot…

[Riddle] / Rachel Cualedare

Here I am where I must be

Rely on shared memory
and instinct for grievance

Softness of the visual storm
incipient through the air

No, I shall not tell it

As out of nowhere a gracious gesture
in the sightlines of the passway

Despite a personal oddness of cadence
it translates

Breath of yellow meadow on the littered hill
and here I sit in transit

All the theories of one’s own life
like leaves in their iterated flourish

Where I would be I cannot

How Beauty Gets By / Corinne Walsh

A little beauty makes her own shoes, 
and sews her own ball gowns.
She takes her own pictures 
and writes her own songs. 
But when she feels exposed 
beauty needs protection, too. 
She never pretends or fakes it 
just for fun, beauty is always fair.
And little beauty has the keenest eye,
she notices every detail.
I had to turn the light out to write this down. 
Beauty knows enough. 

Her clock is always running 
but rarely tells the time. She is the end, 
the middle, and the start. 
No poem tells its story without a nod to beauty.
In fact she often gets the final word, 
says all the things we wish we could. 
She is the trick and the surprise, Oh, yes
little beauty knows just how to wow the crowd
But beauty also takes your leisure time 
and steals your extra sleep, 
and if you dare to close your eyes, 
she may be gone when you awake.

Winter Cento*  /  Scott Williamson

For an 
unmapped winter 
journey  one
must have
a traveller’s
mind so
soon dark
comes deep
ice tears
melt despite
the snow
on snow
frost wind
frost pane
silver frosted
hair again
wintering an
imagined night
invented under
the moon-
white sky
no need
no none
at all
to die

*Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Heiner Müller, Christina. Rosetti

Day 6 / Poem 6

Petrichor/ [Sadness / Tameca L Coleman

The boy braces
against whistling chill.
Eyes shut, mouth agape—
his pores expand,
imbibe the rain and the musk.
Sweater arms and slacks legs
ripple around planted
limbs.
He tilts at the ankles,
flying from the thin
legs up, letting the speeding wind
hold him, as he glides,
arms spread to a tee.
Above him, lightning
casts crags into shadows.
His clothes slick against skin;
Arm hairs bristle to meet
electric tongues of sky.

October  / Christina Daub

In fall
clopping through 
curled leaves

yellowing 
the path, the horses
prick up their ears

a new chill
chisels the air
lingering

summer sweet
apples heavy
turning soft

and brown
the lower field 
deer parking lot

Ode To Jasper Johns /  Clint Frakes

I.
It is a gray false start to be sure, 
but shivering flora prove abstraction makes salvation, 
even if it annoys parking lot attendants 
& taints the pure snows of Chicago. 
One must be strong to fast in a museum—
& fast to endure the light that ensues. 
False starts are the risk of quickness. 
O Jasper Johns! Emphatic, divorced from jury, 
shall we make this refusal formal? 
1962 was full of defiant charcoal & you gathered stones. 
Let us open the field again, return to the ancient remedies of marble. 
Kill or cure?
Or lay a wreath on ambiguity? 
Enter this new lagoon as a parishioner of doorjambs, 
ironing boards & bales of hair: 
corpuscular, envesseled, leached of spectrum: 
flagstones of mercy, missions of mice. 

II.
I’ll take this night in my skin with an etching in Ursa Major. 
Jasper Johns, at least you found an island on which to be kind!
There is a community of souls, 
but now we must dip hard & pull ourselves 
through heavy water & macabre sonnets, 
discographies & animal skins awakened by the living blood of a Swede. 
I must lean on a wall to take this in.  
The “flume of space” abides in apotheosis. 
The head always turns where go the eyes & 
remember how the city moved you? 
The smell of cheap cigars at the ballpark meant 
the world was fiercely open, leading to labyrinthine 
dreamboats, gauntlets & baseball.  
In nearby dens artists made homages to brooms.

III.
The water folds around the poet like the day’s limn
& I wander this shouldered city employed by mute,
open fields whispering, what is a man now?
Shall I render it indexically? 
O Shroud of Turin! O meek skin! O feast of apparitions! 
I should starve to meet you—I have! 
You Jasper Johns have liberated me for an hour. 
I am no longer a slave to reflex. 
I bow, find my voice in the deepest hollows, 
laugh among the great pillars of the hall, 
look down at all my cousins yawning in their minked hoods, 
gathering like a parade of foxes, no longer immune to their own senses. 
Romans lean on each other to stay standing.
There is something frantic in the air that must be shared & often. 
It’s as clear as a mastodon in a public shower. 
I go to the city among the girls in cerulean tights, 
the kid on crutches, the arabesques of the cumulative 
swirl & see the men and women layered 
in matters I can’t fathom
yet, I think I cannot love them so mutely
& am so hungry that my throat hums, unaimed.

Ebb and Flow  / Francis Judilla

Rearrangeable and Round  / Deborah Kelly

Tuesday night, south of the border city of Ciudad Juárez, a 4-year-old Venezuelan child died, his mother’s foot was severed, and a 17-year-old boy suffered head injuries. 
–Border Report, 5 September 2024

Razor wire snags itself and 
anyone moving
chops anywhere between
          wading in the water
          and drowning in the sea
Under the mesquites
shelter mostly innocents
          about those who make it
          ask the governors
if they’ll have the rabbit out of hiding
for its rescue or to please the yelping beasts

[Labyrinth] / Rachel Cualedare

Yet there are streaks in which the color is drained,
over bodies, over a staggered dimensional grid.

He, convoluted in the corners:
iterations of a beast.

Such a blameless shade of pink—dusky—
as the basis of a lair:

a lair built on logic
and insinuation.

Face upside-down, limbs but apparitions,
and behind a beam, I behold:

the aftermath, which is only the construction
of a scene, anti-static, unweighted, imbued with terror,

and—I see—contained
within an aperture.

The beast’s heart is bright. I am small,
and pale, and can slip inside the grid and guess:

this is not opposed, no, not,
to equilibrium.

Blue at Sunrise (a parody) / Corinne Walsh

If only we could die for beauty I know I would, 
because I have lived for Beauty. And scarce committed 
to my sight, –half devoured by admiration was I 
when one who lived for Fear unannounced appeared.

“What is it you see?” Fear asked, and when I pointed 
to the sky, Fear recoiled, “How Foolish to honor Beauty 
unafraid.” Before I could to reply, Fear reproached me 
further, “How dare you live for sun and moon alone?”

Then when Darkness came to fill the Night –Fear stayed 
and spied upon the stars, and soon the moon begot
its doubtless light –and Fear was blinded by the sight.
We stood together as darkness shone like Truth.

Blue at sunrise, first the crescent moon –balancing 
the burden of the sun, Fear found calmness and patience.
There was room enough to live on under beauty’s spell,
and day broke open with a fire when Fear finally quelled.

Ganymed  /  Scott Williamson

(a version inspired by Goethe)

Spring morning glow 
rings me with 
        a thousand-fold 
               lovewish

Flooding my
        chest 
ecstatic 
        your
forever warmth

Your buds drug 
        my heart
on your breast
        I lie verklempt 

You quench
        an unholy flame-thirst
                  with airborne ambrosia

Nightingale choirs 
        caw their yawps
                winging me dizzy

“Keep arcing
        upwards until 
                the cloud forest
                        envelops you

                        and the lightning
                titan marks 
        you as his own” 

embraced —
embracing — 
                        Up, up to the 
                tips of your 
        divine lips my 
                        sugar pops god

Day 5 / Poem 5

a stone/ [Sadness / Tameca L Coleman

i.
If you hold the sadness, it does not warm
and it leaves a black smudge on your fingers.
The cold makes your hands cold. A slight
pressure in your fingertips when
you put the sadness down. The edges
could scrape.

The sadness leaves
lines in hand, too,
new palmistry.

This sadness is a black sadness,
matte not so easily chipped
as a more porous stone.

The sadness could diminish
with every gentle brush
of a finger, though. Worry
away the hardness, dull
its incongruent edges
which draw in and out
the cold as if it were
a winter’s breath.

ii.
I place the sadness in the river.
Small black spirals pull off from the edge,
the soft sound of the river does as it does
and I breathe the beautiful river smell
and watch sadness swirl off itself and fade, overcome
by this moving body of water. I express
gratitudes, turn shoulders
towards the river,
then away. There’s work to do.

The sun is setting through the riverbank trees
and I walk towards the bridge
that brought me here.

I pause, gauge the distance
between the river and me
and its music fades
with each quiet step
and I’m out past the trees,
into the world again.

In Nettuno  / Christina Daub

                for Serafina

It is difficult to express much more than gratitude 
in a foreign language you don’t speak. And yet, 
when your husband’s mother found me on the beach
reading, and invited me to have a coffee with her,
I understood and gladly accepted, smiling, grateful, 
though I never drink it black or in the afternoon. 
We sat at a small table sipping from tiny cups, 
gesturing, nodding and she shrugged kindly 
when I held up my thumb and forefinger 
making the sign for tiny, for a pinch, as an answer
to whether I could speak Italian. Somehow I
understood she had been to see you, her first time 
flying, first time to America and that her house 
was empty now, and would I like to stay and I would 
have loved to stay, but could not, me dispiace, 
which seemed to make her sad, this dear and radiant 
woman whose face was tenderness and warmth, 
sand ripple and sea, who’d lived her whole life 
in this coastal town I was only passing through.  

It would have been an honor to stay in her house,
see her pictures, imagine her life selling fish 
for forty years, dependent on the bounty 
from the sea. I would have loved to hear her tales 
of growing up after the war, what she remembered, 
what stories she’d been told, whether any Americans 
remained behind after “the liberation landing” in 1944. 
And what she felt when her son moved here, 
so far away. Perhaps she would have counseled, 
don’t worry, the sons come back, never often enough, 
but they come and bring their families and for a brief 
time hai il paradiso, hugging the ones you raised,
learning about their lives while their children play
in the same golden sand as their ancestors, oblivious
to the shifting tides of families, and waning elders:
this mamma, this nonna whose unfluctuating love is
as generous and gentle-waved as the Tyrrhenian Sea.

In Dorothea Tanning’s Bed /  Clint Frakes

In Dorothea Tanning’s bed was a horse liver,
a hundred dried peas, a scarred manatee.
There was napalm & lime finches,
a river tented over with caterpillars,
jade wrenches & carrion.
There was an orangery in her bed.
Minerva went mad, brought mist from the fields &
bees slept, each immured like a frozen star.
Salted meats swung from the rafters &
Stalin wore a linen hat made from her bed.
There were snapping turtles & adamantine lyres.
There were ribs, green coral & fool’s dice—
the trill of ancient lexicons all teamed in her bed.
One post was a palanquin, another an odd oriel—
the third a minaret.

The fourth was a kiosk where tall women gathered

near the Bosphorus, wearing myrtle wreaths.
In Dorothea’s bed the sea had a shoulder.
The dew of summer was broken.

Children sang with the TV under her bed.
There were land snails & vast scrolls of missives.
Branches of laughter grew like Amazonian vines—
taking the shape of griffins, manticores & basilisks.
They buried the slain serpents of Thebes under her bed.
Great blue mesas eroded on her bed.

Under her bed were a mother’s eyestalks,
the glare of pollen—
all the teeth lost in dreams.

You are not here by chance  / Francis Judilla

Rearrangeable and Round   / Deborah Kelly

If normal is marked by the nipple on a bell curve:

1. so too the highest point of a sleeping dromedary
2. the rest of us are human

A cough knocks you off the apex of your stasis
caused by 1. nervousness 2. dry air 3. infection
To know which          the observer needs further evidence

Just as inherent neurodivergence is not proved by behaviors typical of people
who have lived a little
and are marked by it

Such naming is often mistaken     like anthropomorphism
as the squirrel is not nervous
the cow is not dull
mules aren’t stubborn                     the nervous human is not a squirrel
the dull human is not a cow                       the stubborn human is not a mule

Life rolls less on spectra and more on color wheels
complimentary colors                     clashes that cannot be attributed to rebellion
Indeed the world is not flat and you will not find the end of it
We live three-dimensional (at least) rearrangeable and round

[Translucent wing] / Rachel Cualedare

A turtle dove’s translucent wing skims the pane
and discloses absence:

of layers and strains of voice.

Sleep has not yet cleared the clear horizon,
and still: the shelf of growth obscures instantiation.

In the past this would have been a rapture:

the meeting of two seasons upon a seamless sky.
Transcend is what we say: the road, to the road as it was,

and by the map of mind matter that dissolves:
dissolves into green fronds, and a murmur: murmur

in what we call the womb.

Love Letter / Corinne Walsh

Dear Love,

You are gone in the morning mist
like a poem I didn’t write down.

Did I let you go or you fled?

In any case I know that beauty
holds you in its fist
like a coin from a magic trick.
I believe you may appear
anywhere.

XO

A Loaf of Phillip Glass /  Scott Williamson

What kind of bread does Phillip Glass
like? Examining the one-act
Phillip Glass Buys A Loaf Of Bread
one finds the minimal mini play 
does not say which kind of loaf
said minimalist composer prefers. 

Would the type-casting change if 
Phil’s Loaf were an opera? Glass did write
them about Akhenaten, Einstein, and Gandhi.
Why not “Challah on the Beach: the Musical”?

Where might we find Phillip Glass in an 
opera written about his patisserie choices? 
He’s the avuncular baritone singing a theme 
that repeats itself repeats itself repeats repeats
and braids the work together like a baker.

Even if his loaf is stolen or confiscated 
Phil keeps smiling like a bodhisattva not 
missing missing a beat a beat not missing a 
beat missing not missing a not missing beat
missing a missing Phillip Glass Phillip Phillip Glass.

Day 4 / Poem 4

North Carolina, 2024 / Tameca L Coleman

These curving roads last for ages
and they get so dark at night, they have to turn
mailboxes into lighthouses.

I don’t tell you this, but these long drives
feel like home. We’re travelling
from cigarette town to somewhere more spare,
and then back again, hours, passing many small places.

On the way to see your family, we make a stop across from an orchard
where they sell hard peaches and beat up strawberries in May.
I buy a little basket of peaches for your sister;
you buy a couple bags of pig skins for the road and for your mother;
I buy us some grape cider, but I don’t realize it’s grape cider
because the label says “muscadine,” which is a fun new word for me
and the young woman at the cash register doesn’t know what muscadine means either.

When we get to your family’s town, your Mom asks if I like it here,
and I think about how the newly green orchard trees
across from the fruit stand aren’t yet fruiting,
and how they look so beautiful anyway
with all the waterlogged clouds rolling up like they do,
and the woods standing behind them, lush and wild,
and how I’m content running errands with you,
heading to Costco for discount gas,
to the grocery and to the pet store to grab foodstuffs for the week,
and to sit and wait with you at the brake shop, and look across the road
wondering what that building over there is.

I say I’ll stay here if you want me to, and you say
“there’s nothing here.”

We drive back, hours, riding the twilight into that thick country dark,
and at the entrance to the apartment complex, we swing the snaky road a quarter mile
and then park.

You feed the cat. We hug goodnight.
In the morning, there’s so much light in the guest room by seven.
The window is cracked open and I hear birdsong like I’ve never heard.

Outside the hot air is soft to touch, and I saw a black butterfly
float past us and back into the green.

remedies for a long bitten tongue  / Christina Daub

hyssop, a sponge soaked in questions,
a high dose of pens, better pillows, 
peppermint growing in the cracked 
window pot, noisemakers, a car horn, 
swear words, a balcony for proclamations 
and poetry, volumes and stacks, lemon 
and honey-doused tea by the cupful, 
unlined paper to absorb the turbulence 
of ink, substacks, podcasts, radio 
interviews, fully charged keyboards 
and mice, saxifrage (splitter of stone),
kind audiences, a trail of plums 
you follow to finally get comfortable 
speaking, your mouth, the new place
you’ve moved into, your tongue a couch
to sprawl on, to hum a bit, recite, dare 
to voice at last what you’ve long felt, 
but weren’t allowed to express or even feel. 

On Saying Goodbye /  Clint Frakes

“You never get what you want in this life, so why not shake your hair
loose on a boat at play in dawn light?”   
                                                      –Li Po

It’s always goodbye that commences when bodies align.
I could say all this started in January
or when my lady was born. 
Maybe it started with my first breath,
or visions of Oregon rivers. 
There was a sacred place where we followed the buffalo
to the Upper World
& the umbilical waters were the first
pool privileges I ever had. 
In either case, I traveled thousands of miles for a good hill
to sing her praises,
prepare a bed for her. 
I waited for her to arrive
& show us the space we are.

Now I court the creosote wind for more subtle favors
& feel soft salt sing in my bones.
The pilgrimage steps of the ancestors
assumed only the worthiness of the hunt.
I returned to the shore to lay flowers at her kind prospect. 
Once I wrote a poem about it
just as she drew close. 
I watched the big-eyed children
& peach blossoms fell into the swift river.

The masters were of little help in the end—
but they knew the best path to the outhouse
& where not to step.
This is when wine easily swallows my lips—
& quicker than moonlight.
People like it when you write because  
for a moment you stop talking.
A thousand jasmine-scented goddesses
could not persuade me to come here again,
yet I savor it so.

I will stop complaining when I reach the Great Star River
& reassess what dust is left of the unknown.
The yellow birds remain tireless
just as summer never really left—
not its fox dens or lost horses. 
I ached my way through the planets that made me—
sometimes while dancing.
My water, corn and iron
can be neither forsaken nor helped.

I Need You To Slow Down   / Francis Judilla

Easy Landing   / Deborah Kelly

Sky-tram cables thrum back
against a westerly,
over flanks of schist
toward frozen tarmac.
I’m not afraid of black ice,
I’m not afraid of stillness.
I’m in thrall of deep time.
Not New York time,
not LA time,
but mid-cable, 
where the carriage rocks
against cobalt wind,
while death still tastes like 
a sugar skull, if I think of it.
More and more,
I envision a cool dark door 
in white calcimine adobe,
where blue pools around 
low parapets.
I like an easy landing.

[Sheer green veil] / Rachel Cualedare

Sheer green veil
over the blue-white sky

Steadfast clearing
in a trashed forest

Child’s sheer enjoyment
of a popsicle;

she stands and cocks her head
to bite the melting corner

The sister of emotion itself
is she, herself,

and she builds,
with words, and beyond, relation

Drone of timeless tonic harmony
under the belted voice,

beside the decision of bow on string,
ecstatic in its control

Calm down!
Not everything happens right now

Yes, this
I said to her, myself

Sheer blue curtain
over the pale fullness of the morning

Child’s face breathes
into the medium

And I hold the line

Interior with a Violin Case by Henri Matisse / Corinne Walsh

Start with the illusion of the distant clouds sifting 
through the white curtains, of the seaward facing balcony. 
See how the small vanity table and chair act as 
audience at the closest angle to the open window.  
Try not to be distracted by the undulating patterns
of the wallpaper and its twisting articulation of tentacles 
(possibly belonging to an overactive mollusk, species unknown).
No, you must pay attention to the uneven latticework on the carpet 
It leads to the threshold of the balcony and connects 
the outside world to the elegant interior.
Everything appears settled into its assigned position 
such a well-balanced composition, comforting to the eye even
until you notice the soft flames of color intruding, 
like invasive vines of shadow and light creeping 
in through the open balcony beneath the level whiteness 
of the intentional light painted onto the vanity 
and its complicit chair. That’s when you see the violin case,
open, empty like a yawning mouth unable to speak
resting on the outstretched arms of the empty armchair. 
This is not the end or the beginning.
What’s missing from view in the room is more prevalent
than the pleasing colors or the angles and lines framing the chaos.
What’s missing is deafening to the eyes in its implication of music 
Present in the cacophony of stillness, listen, and you will hear
the last wavering notes of a violin singing to the sea.

Two Shorts /  Scott Williamson

I. Saving a place for Kafka

First put Franz under the table at Elijah’s end. 
Remind him not to metamorphose during the reading of the plagues.

If you do not hear the chariot approaching,
       you may surmise the prophet is appearing elsewhere.

Invite Franz up to the empty place.

If he expresses terror at this prospect reassure him he’s the most honored
         imaginary guest present.

Remind him not to bring insects to the table. 
          Or sing.

II. Advice for young artists

Get the day job first. 
          Then quit it before they tell you not to.
There really is no such thing as a free lunch.
          Never sing for your supper; you’ll regret it by breakfast.

Day 3 / Poem 3

Two Meditations on Fire: / Tameca L Coleman

i.

you cannot
steal the fire

it is not yours

alone to hold.

harmony
is

a wick’s flame that knows

it burns.

ii.

[ I am a burning house]

I’ve been entangled in fingers whose men wore cool heads and boxed up hearts. I’d taught them to look into the fire. They stared into the hearth and saw a burning house. They fled, left me there, believing themselves to be men of wooden hearts, negating heart’s nature in their blindness in favor of fables where hearts made tinder die in the flames.

Truth is: [ I’m all fire now]

History of the Future / Christina Daub

Walking the same road Caesar 
trod, centuries-worn stones
paving the way, we come to the ruins
of the Largo di Torre Argentina
where a reenactment is occurring— 
men in white togas and red robes 
gathering as the Senate to assassinate
their leader and dictator in perpetuum, 
Julius Caesar. People press against 
the rails leaning into this gory act, 
twenty-three protracted stabbings 
feeding an audience’s hunger
for savagery and blood, not
unlike the ongoing wars,  
the centuries-old greed for land 
we somehow agree, still, is worth 
killing for and dying for. 

Where Lies the Passage of Light /  Clint Frakes

(after Ammons)

I have considered how light spills without intent,
exposing all surface it touches—
& how the Mule deer’s dark morning legs in motion
defy nothing, as it nibbles salty buckbrush,
undisguised at my backdoor.
Light asks nothing & shapes all—

even as I slaughter my daily beasts by its rhythm
to weave another day’s geography of purpose.
Once, my good red blood spilled & glistened
while my pumping organs stayed safely unseen.  
I have watched the cottonwood leaves rotting
in the blonde grass under skylit beads

of September dew. Only weeks ago
I marveled at the gloss they gathered—
spinning silver in the same light that now pulls them low.
A spider runs along the twinkling curtain rod
that shields me from the rays
which announce all that needs praise—

or a scant eddy of meaning.
Breath deepens toward the need for meat and grain.
I am shown what needs to be cleaned
& what needs to be gathered:
children to be taught of their great ascent.
Nothing will escape the cascade of Earth’s spin today,

as I turn toward & away from comforts & pains,
my ears ringing in their own damp shadows.
Dawn’s horses shake their manes
against the spectrum that gathers around them.
The heart is but a cradle of moments,
passed from night to this,

& the stars fade into light’s excess.

To-do List  / Francis Judilla

Water the lawn, put away groceries,

Rest   / Deborah Kelly

Dust cloud from the Sahara
a cool-hush to oceanic storms

light shadow shape of a hand

I fantasize that I will learn to sign
and give up oral speech altogether

that muscles of my body large and small
be read as verity

audible as wind that smells of lightning and water
afferent as sand on skin

I gust talk and talk and seek-out talk

Rest cyclones and hurricanes
under signatures of blown dust 

[Straight cement] / Rachel Cualedare

Straight cement of the curb
and a series of tar footprints.

 We call this pleasant.

 Halves of maple seed “airplanes,”
dead eight months or more,
shunt on the sidewalk;

 my shadow bounces down
the shadow of a series of parallel bars.

 This, my voice,
has spoken words that are not mine
day in, day out.

Voices of concourse, of song, of sheer inanity
have become the white sky
of a gorgeous late-summer evening.

Evening quiet with draped feathered grasses;
with lines of ambient cars on what we call the thoroughfare.

Quiet with the masterful bass
of the plaintive chords I love, I love,
clear in my head as what?
As day.

Poids Net / Corinne Walsh

If anything
we weigh each other down
like the undeniable weight 
of water
sinking into the ground
after a summer rain.
Undeniable gravity,
my family, 
the weight I carry 
anywhere I go, 
and when I return home
I feel their pull,
and sink.

Walter Benjamin’s unfinished compendium /  Scott Williamson

from Walter Benjamin’s unfinished compendium of forgotten band names

Indolent Caravanserai
Underground Travel Souvenirs
Bored Automatons
Polyclinic Antiques
Fashion Conspiracies
Vagrant Beer Halls
Teodor Singing
Stamp-shop Enlargements
Theorized Constellations
Fixation Strata
Radio Sex Arcade
Incognito Utensils
Pilfering Carousels
Polemic Nutshells 
Synthetic Ballast
The Gambling Doll
Soul Commodity
Infallible Façades
Books and Harlots
Backwards Angels
Mechanical Flâneur 
Reproduction Exile
Doctor’s Night Bell
Death Mask Fetish

Day 2 / Poem 2

Anyway / Tameca L. Coleman

the way the sunlight moves across its slant
slides over the wall
over the books
warms the late morning
air

highlights
stray cobwebs
thickening with dust
fresh webs prisming
in their drift
ceiling cracks swelling
into my consciousness

how carpenter ants sent out from their nests
towards the minerals on my body prompt me to shake out the pillows
spray the room and the sheets with a deterrent that smells good to me
wash my body too of all that haunts
watch it slither down the shower drain

the flies next
move towards the sink and the new medicine on the counter
“they are not always attacks,” a healer says
buzz buzz a celebration buzzing their congratulations
buzz

you see the autumn crickets too
one flies out of your shoe
see

now you are laughing
how the storm leakage into the basement
warns that you have cocooned long enough
and how the spiders
pause on a stack of writing
or how the squirrel on the other side of the window crossing
the fence casts the shadow of its curled tail as a question

anyway, “there’s a silver line of light that forms a pathway to the door.”*

*Quote from Meghan Lamb’s book Failure to Thrive

Tree of Miracles / Christina Daub

Let me begin again as almond 
or olive reaching over the cat 
snoozing on a stone wall in late 
day sun. Let me stretch this time 
my roots over and under yours
as we find the will to grow something 
greater than ourselves. Let me fall 
like a ripe fig into your crooked 
hand and bend when I need to bend
uphill. This time I will shade 
like the lemon tree and wait 
for an azure omen, the bell down 
the valley announcing your return, 
and sprout all the nicknames 
we ever called each other while
the lovers carve their names 
in my renewing wood.

Setting Out Late /  Clint Frakes

I have not wept enough & I’ve seas yet to see.
I think of the fathers who walk through grass & sage
remembering sons that left too early—
their milky faces shaping rainy Sundays.
It will always be too early when they leave
& we will run from something we cannot know—
the simple shadows of this churn,
directions we might have turned.
There were some days I stayed inside,
refused to open my front door,
wishing there were less of the world.
The brown-eyed woman will not return—
not even in the blue-flowered rooms of 3 a.m. dreams.
This makes impossible mountains more near—
breathing in willful steps as the sun floats away
& porchlights now wanting for moons.

There isn’t much time  / Francis Judilla

but you need to listen up,

Dispersed Camping   / Deborah Kelly

           Brims drawn over our eyes
                        drip chance 
                        into our teacups
cold tea and wet sweaters
our speechless hiatus
brought on by rain

Shadows aggregate in woodlands,
grape-blue eddying the tree trunks
the underside of autumn
when leaves fall like fans of fire
and downpour smooths them to ground

                        There
                       on tent walls
downpour pounds
or slows and taps 
             and in our sleep sacks
we listen like sheep dogs

but more curious
wanting not to break the listening hours
                       with our sounds
                        not with our sounds

[Silver and gold] / Rachel Cualedare

Silver and gold

It will not square

Recurring theme:

run and break:
D major, and so on

Stop the clock

Child’s brush
on the dry oval
of a child’s palette

It is my lot
to count
and be abound

Purple painted cloud, sure

And only fair

for all the marigolds
to die, die, die

Lay that bucket down

For but a child
could measure this:
an ounce

Patience / Corinne Walsh

When passion settles like dampness 
                    in soil after the rain, 
love grows the seed that finds the sun
and warmth and light let the flower come.

sum fluxae pretium spei*

(for 1-3 voices)        

                        I am    the prize                    of                    flowering hope                          
                                                                                                                                         wild silent
bright wanderer                                                                              music echo
            shining aria-stars                                                                             pianissimo

***                                                                                                       tense
            verses                                                                                                ***
                        ***                                                                                                       (silence)

today is for                                                                                                    noticed
            itself enough                                                                         visitors

smiled                                                                                                                        winter
            bade                                                                                                  kissed
                        strode                                                                        streams
            breathed                                                                                           frozen
strewn                                                                                                                        free

            rarely, rarely                                                                                      arise
weary ditty                                                                                                                as one
***                                                                                                                   reproach

            cruel wings                                                                                       pursue alone

                       wilt      stay                                                                 measure

                                                            pity                            
                                                                                   pay

Day 1 / Poem 1

This tree still seeding and bending over the road / Tameca L. Coleman

This tree, seeding
pinecones, sapping to heal, 
sticky sap, smells and tastes good,
whatever drip, whatever crust,
whatever opening, whatever
moldering, whatever grows.

This tree solidifies hearts
carved over the underside 
of where the bark once covered:
someone + someone 4ever! 

This tree carries seals
and goes on.

This tree carries, 
reaches for sunlight still, 
branches bronchial,
roots burrowing sure 
as ever, thirsty 
as ever, home 
and breath 
and rustle 
and shade
and messenger as ever!

Lightning struck awhile ago,
struck through and shook this tree.
Slashed down deeper into a fork,
burnt and brittled some,
split the wood. 

This tree still seeding,
pinecone-ing, sapping,
holding, hosting
life, reaching for the sun, 
rooting down sure and thirsty as ever.

This tree lets
wind take burnt 
and brittle parts,

lets earth take back
and molder. This tree bends new
branches over the road.

Rainbow / Christina Daub

Arcobaleno, arch of the flash in Italian,
rising or descending from the slate grey sky
as the domes and towers of Rome catch
the reappearing sun, shine clean, the bright
blue patches returning between the great 
puffs overhead blossoming like peaches
in a rosy light, domain of Raphael’s cherubs
peering over the bridge from the other world shaking
the drops off their wet wings.

 Note to Li Po /  Clint Frakes

from a swimming pool in Rimrock, AZ

 Dude, we have the same haircut—& me a milk-fed
rogue from across the world. These words that carry
the Mystery now prompt us to share souls:
pilgrims to the end, always restored by the merit of plum wine. 
So I write this in your Tang Dynasty high school yearbook:

“See you in the Yangtze Valley, bro & we’ll party
with the ancestral wind. Have a kick-ass summer!”

 I will play you Elvis songs & you will show me
the South Gate of eternity in your woven
moonstruck robe. I too want to drape my ribcage
in white, care about everything to the point of nothing,
as we cruise the frosted vineyards of the immortals.
I am far less than half a world & one wicked millennium
from you.  Those fat, meandering rivers
where we wade as the gaudy gibbons shriek
bring bone to this matter?

No one will remember the clown-like shadows
that stitch the afternoon to the clouds &
the basalt hills, where oily cedar and musky elk draw breath.
I caught myself defending my eyes against this wind
I so love—& the monks blowing snot
into the acrid weeds of road-dust July.
They are the only fools who don’t fail to see the rabbit in the moon
from under the pink-leaved cinnamon tree.
They keep track of the mountain’s many faces–
count the crows that fly from the mulberry grove,
one by one, toward the sun.

Loosen up, would ya?  / Francis Judilla

There is a rhythm
to the monotony
of obligation,

Neighbors  / Deborah Kelly

I know three or four of you would eat me if you were
enough hungry but I’m glad you’re scraping
bark with your claws
pouncing on elk       sorting out your pack’s order

And I need to know you’re there   feeding
and trees still grow by fingering the soil for water
all of which I hear
since I stopped naming each species as if I were Adam

As if your life   or mine   depended on being named
language as instrument of measurement
an independently verified weight

My name   I’ve swallowed it in syllables 
thumb-beats on steering wheels to music
because I need to know you will devour 
all this language   my dear neighbors
sometimes    make it good and gone

[My own incline] / Rachel Cualedare

My own incline
is a poor pocket
that none shall rob

Catgrass that smells like pot
growing by the airport in a long,
staggered mass

Punch the engine 

Do I mind
to cast my own time
to what, in plural,
is decreed,

and by you?

Foul, foul air
between the bridges

This, at least, lends
an interstice of depth
that is—what?—

 as primary
as time
itself. And lo:

the stakes of the city
anding in my physical heart
as on the dirt field
where none shall grow.

 Party Guests / Corinne Walsh

Like guests at a party, 
pity poems show up first. 
With both hands out, 
palms up, begging shamelessly
to be heard and written down.
Why have you come? I ask.
But pity poems rarely answer direct questions,
they just show up, uninvited to the party
where everyone seems to know each other or pretends to. 
No alms do I offer.
Nothing do I have to give. 
But pity poems are cunning
and may arrive unnoticed, sneaking in.
These double dipping moochers bring 
cheap wine and drink everyone else’s beer. 
I wish I had more patience for these desperate 
little pity poems starving for attention,
and hoping for a misplaced second chance
at charm, claiming love at first sight:
drooling sycophants, what don’t they don’t understand? 
Poets want poems who lead the way, 
you know the kind, overconfident, well paid.
The invited ones who walk right up
and hand us their coats,
enticing us to playfully undress them for display.  
It’s really no secret poets desire desirable verses, 
(prefer them over the pitiful pretty wallflowers poems)
poems, who when they come won’t be turned away
poems that parade up on to the Lido deck 
of our imaginary ship, recklessly sipping cocktails,
swaying gaily under the moon, ready,
all ready to embark on their mystery trip.

How to ignore exercise equipment: a short guide /  Scott Williamson

First visualize your perfect 
shape and then encircle
it with affirmation. Next
run around your room your
space your corner run round and 
round your head as if you
were herding steer.
If the maid of the 
mill enchants you,
exorcise said equipment 
and flex your neo-
cortex. Curb-stomp the
tread til you’ve killed it. 
Like you did this workout.