A poem by Alfred Nicol
originally published in Per Contra magazine
An Innocence
Like Robert Burns, I too turn up a nest
while working, raking last year's leaves in spring.
But not a mouse. Pale rabbits, shivering,
rustled from their blind and naked rest.
If they showed fright, I'd feel it in my chest,
but only shying from the chill, they cling
together close, alive as anything,
three steps from Route 1A. Unwelcome guest,
I have surprised them in their nursery,
stumbling on the bed and canopy
their diligent though absent mother built,
with muzzle-fashioned, straw-and-lapin quilt,
but I am less disturbance than a flea.
They focus on the task at hand. To be.
originally published in Per Contra magazine
An Innocence
Like Robert Burns, I too turn up a nest
while working, raking last year's leaves in spring.
But not a mouse. Pale rabbits, shivering,
rustled from their blind and naked rest.
If they showed fright, I'd feel it in my chest,
but only shying from the chill, they cling
together close, alive as anything,
three steps from Route 1A. Unwelcome guest,
I have surprised them in their nursery,
stumbling on the bed and canopy
their diligent though absent mother built,
with muzzle-fashioned, straw-and-lapin quilt,
but I am less disturbance than a flea.
They focus on the task at hand. To be.
A poem by Anthony Febo
Missing you in two parts
one.
if there is anyway i can forget the scent of your smile, how it fills the air like rain in a forest. then i hope, if forget it like autumn. a marvelous display of beauty before the last leaf falls. somewhere out there is a creek, and the rippling of the current does not sound like your name, i will swim thee one day. but until then, let the tide of the Atlantic carry me on your tongue. let me crash behind your teeth every time you speak so i can feel at home even while i drown. i pray, that the wind will bring me to peace. where i can drink, and it will taste like water and nothing else. even if i have to be dragged through the mud.
two.
if there is anyway my neck can forget the embrace of your whisper, how it covers my skin like a lunar eclipse. then i hope, i forget it like breath. the last link that connects me with all that i know. somewhere out there is a sidewalk. where the concrete does not feel like the weight of your goodbye, i will walk there one day. but until then, let every building be a testament to the height we achieved. let every lamp post be a spotlight for the nights we danced. so i can share the stage with you even if its our final bow. i pray that the streets will guide me to peace, where i can walk and not see your face on every passerby. even if i have to fall through the cracks.
Missing you in two parts
one.
if there is anyway i can forget the scent of your smile, how it fills the air like rain in a forest. then i hope, if forget it like autumn. a marvelous display of beauty before the last leaf falls. somewhere out there is a creek, and the rippling of the current does not sound like your name, i will swim thee one day. but until then, let the tide of the Atlantic carry me on your tongue. let me crash behind your teeth every time you speak so i can feel at home even while i drown. i pray, that the wind will bring me to peace. where i can drink, and it will taste like water and nothing else. even if i have to be dragged through the mud.
two.
if there is anyway my neck can forget the embrace of your whisper, how it covers my skin like a lunar eclipse. then i hope, i forget it like breath. the last link that connects me with all that i know. somewhere out there is a sidewalk. where the concrete does not feel like the weight of your goodbye, i will walk there one day. but until then, let every building be a testament to the height we achieved. let every lamp post be a spotlight for the nights we danced. so i can share the stage with you even if its our final bow. i pray that the streets will guide me to peace, where i can walk and not see your face on every passerby. even if i have to fall through the cracks.
A poem by Elisabeth Houston
originally published in The Jewish Quarterly
Origami Poem
i.
There were poems neat as origami. Unfold me,
she wanted to say. Spread me open
like a little Chinese fan.
ii.
She had loved him on a Tuesday.
They will never return to Tuesday.
She looks through the velvet curtains, peek into The Long Ago Past
but she sees nothing.
iii.
She does not know it,
but within a cold, cobalt day
there is a tender synchronicity, an arrow
fixed perfectly in her chest.
originally published in The Jewish Quarterly
Origami Poem
i.
There were poems neat as origami. Unfold me,
she wanted to say. Spread me open
like a little Chinese fan.
ii.
She had loved him on a Tuesday.
They will never return to Tuesday.
She looks through the velvet curtains, peek into The Long Ago Past
but she sees nothing.
iii.
She does not know it,
but within a cold, cobalt day
there is a tender synchronicity, an arrow
fixed perfectly in her chest.
A poem by Enzo Silon Surin
originally published in Tidal Basin Review - Spring 2011
High School English
Byron escorted from the pages,
ambulance siren falling away
through the frost window.
Peer at the clock, alter your route home—long poem.
What carries you, a lonely ascent
for which the objective’s clear: regard both time and reason.
The streets pole toward hue and cry,
the trek becomes infinite.
Better to mean what you say than to say what you mean.
Conceal your syntax, bid no explanations.
_____________
Tomorrow’s a standard deviation.
Where we live, the weight of which
depends on small silences
we fit ourselves into.
originally published in Tidal Basin Review - Spring 2011
High School English
Byron escorted from the pages,
ambulance siren falling away
through the frost window.
Peer at the clock, alter your route home—long poem.
What carries you, a lonely ascent
for which the objective’s clear: regard both time and reason.
The streets pole toward hue and cry,
the trek becomes infinite.
Better to mean what you say than to say what you mean.
Conceal your syntax, bid no explanations.
_____________
Tomorrow’s a standard deviation.
Where we live, the weight of which
depends on small silences
we fit ourselves into.
A poem by Erich Haygun
Tell
In workshops I facilitate for high school students,
I tell them the importance of being a good bystander.
I tell them the incident of Kitty Genovese, 1964.
Stabbed and raped repeatedly in a parking lot while an
Entire building of witnesses did not know it was their problem.
I do not tell them why I have volunteered to tell them this.
In conversations with men I work for
I do not tell them there are words I will never tell anyone.
If you aren't familiar with the idiom "No Homo," I will be the one
To tell you that what began as some dumb shit a rapper said,
Has become an elaborate game of monitoring peer behavior
Through the lens of homosexuality, claiming a pat on the back of
The head simulating a blowjob every time the disclaimer is not spoken.
I tell my coworkers that for straight guys,
They think about gay sex, like, really a lot.
I do not tell them every fact I know about violence.
I tell them cities I've lived in, reasons I've been arrested.
In this telling I do not explain whoever I kiss, I call myself queer.
I tell them that I simply opt out of their game.
When footage of the word faggot falling from
Kobe Bryant's lips comes on television at work
The reaction is not as bad as I expect.
But it's not any better. And I tell them nothing.
I do not tell them how the point isn't Kobe's temper
Or the referee's feelings or the price of the penalty.
I do not tell them the moral equivalency
Of a white player and a different slur.
I do not tell them I believe this is all related.
I tell them nothing. Nothing I tell them will help.
I tell adolescent reflections of myself that their
Actions directly impact the community we share.
I tell them that all assault affects each of us
And that it never only their responsibility.
In this telling, I do not address questions
The room does not need to know my answer for.
I do not tell them the right to unspeak from personal experience.
I do not tell them how often I am a staggering coward.
Tell
In workshops I facilitate for high school students,
I tell them the importance of being a good bystander.
I tell them the incident of Kitty Genovese, 1964.
Stabbed and raped repeatedly in a parking lot while an
Entire building of witnesses did not know it was their problem.
I do not tell them why I have volunteered to tell them this.
In conversations with men I work for
I do not tell them there are words I will never tell anyone.
If you aren't familiar with the idiom "No Homo," I will be the one
To tell you that what began as some dumb shit a rapper said,
Has become an elaborate game of monitoring peer behavior
Through the lens of homosexuality, claiming a pat on the back of
The head simulating a blowjob every time the disclaimer is not spoken.
I tell my coworkers that for straight guys,
They think about gay sex, like, really a lot.
I do not tell them every fact I know about violence.
I tell them cities I've lived in, reasons I've been arrested.
In this telling I do not explain whoever I kiss, I call myself queer.
I tell them that I simply opt out of their game.
When footage of the word faggot falling from
Kobe Bryant's lips comes on television at work
The reaction is not as bad as I expect.
But it's not any better. And I tell them nothing.
I do not tell them how the point isn't Kobe's temper
Or the referee's feelings or the price of the penalty.
I do not tell them the moral equivalency
Of a white player and a different slur.
I do not tell them I believe this is all related.
I tell them nothing. Nothing I tell them will help.
I tell adolescent reflections of myself that their
Actions directly impact the community we share.
I tell them that all assault affects each of us
And that it never only their responsibility.
In this telling, I do not address questions
The room does not need to know my answer for.
I do not tell them the right to unspeak from personal experience.
I do not tell them how often I am a staggering coward.
A poem by Jade Sylvan
You know how sometimes you’re in your twenties in America and you’ve learned every lesson you’re ever going to learn about ten times already, and you start to realize that’s what learning is, not answering questions, but finding ways to ask the same questions over and over again?
You’re twenty-one or twenty-nine and your heart’s been broken somewhere between four and twenty times-fetal-position-on-the-bathroom-floor broken, real-country-music broken-and you don’t know how you can ever be expected to go on like this for fifty more years and change.
You have scars. You’ve injured your body in ways that will never fully heal, and you realize you are slowly, incorrigibly sliding away from some physical perfection you imagine you must have possessed sometime in the distant past. Maybe when you were fourteen. Maybe the day you were born.
You’ve gone on and off your medication and the bottle. You’ve had your first marriage and maybe your first divorce, or maybe you’ve always broken things off or been broken off. You’ve screwed and you’ve made love. You’re pretty sure you know the difference now.
You’ve thought of suicide in a post-adolescent way at least once. Practically. Stoically. Without any late-night phone calls. Just sober in a dimly lit bedroom, weighing cons and pros.
Maybe you’ve changed your name or your gender and sometimes, if you’re not paying attention, you forget while filling out customs forms or grocery store reward card applications or your taxes and start to write those outdated letters and then, shaking your own head at itself, have to cross them out and start over. Maybe at that moment you recognize your fourteen-year-old self inside you somewhere, with black fingernail polish and matching rubber bands on her braces, and realize she’s been there all along, and she will always be there, and sometimes when you’re distracted she can sneak up to the surface of your skin just enough to slip her voice onto your paperwork.
You’ve lost god, or you’ve found Him. This hasn’t changed things as much as you’d hoped.
Maybe you’ve had a child and stared at its tubular body and limbs and twenty tiny perfect digits with awe and gratitude and terror, and you wonder what you did to trick the universe into believing you were smart or stable enough for this level of entrustment, and you realize that this is how your parents must have felt looking at you, quaking in their ridiculous retro fashions, and you can’t help but think of their parents quaking too with amazement in black and white or sepia, and their parents and theirs and all the way back to Adam and Eve or Lucy the Neanderthal and her mate, and how they all must have felt somehow the same staring down at their children, these pudgy defiances of entropy created without skill or logic or intention, by accident, flawlessly, and you think even the intelligent algorithm that sets bosons aspin must have its slip-ups and loopholes, and you think, in your most self-indulgent fantasias of personification, that the laws of motion themselves must feel uncertain at times, and maybe the gods, too, are making it all up as they go along, and maybe one day, when she’s in her twenties, you can posit this hypothesis to your child over beers, and she’ll listen and roll it over inside her perfect, separate skull, and respond with a perspective on all of it that you’ve never in your half-century of life even considered, and maybe this, her mouth which is not your mouth over the head of her beer, will finally, for a moment, make you feel unalone.
You know how sometimes you’re in your twenties in America and you’ve learned every lesson you’re ever going to learn about ten times already, and you start to realize that’s what learning is, not answering questions, but finding ways to ask the same questions over and over again?
You’re twenty-one or twenty-nine and your heart’s been broken somewhere between four and twenty times-fetal-position-on-the-bathroom-floor broken, real-country-music broken-and you don’t know how you can ever be expected to go on like this for fifty more years and change.
You have scars. You’ve injured your body in ways that will never fully heal, and you realize you are slowly, incorrigibly sliding away from some physical perfection you imagine you must have possessed sometime in the distant past. Maybe when you were fourteen. Maybe the day you were born.
You’ve gone on and off your medication and the bottle. You’ve had your first marriage and maybe your first divorce, or maybe you’ve always broken things off or been broken off. You’ve screwed and you’ve made love. You’re pretty sure you know the difference now.
You’ve thought of suicide in a post-adolescent way at least once. Practically. Stoically. Without any late-night phone calls. Just sober in a dimly lit bedroom, weighing cons and pros.
Maybe you’ve changed your name or your gender and sometimes, if you’re not paying attention, you forget while filling out customs forms or grocery store reward card applications or your taxes and start to write those outdated letters and then, shaking your own head at itself, have to cross them out and start over. Maybe at that moment you recognize your fourteen-year-old self inside you somewhere, with black fingernail polish and matching rubber bands on her braces, and realize she’s been there all along, and she will always be there, and sometimes when you’re distracted she can sneak up to the surface of your skin just enough to slip her voice onto your paperwork.
You’ve lost god, or you’ve found Him. This hasn’t changed things as much as you’d hoped.
Maybe you’ve had a child and stared at its tubular body and limbs and twenty tiny perfect digits with awe and gratitude and terror, and you wonder what you did to trick the universe into believing you were smart or stable enough for this level of entrustment, and you realize that this is how your parents must have felt looking at you, quaking in their ridiculous retro fashions, and you can’t help but think of their parents quaking too with amazement in black and white or sepia, and their parents and theirs and all the way back to Adam and Eve or Lucy the Neanderthal and her mate, and how they all must have felt somehow the same staring down at their children, these pudgy defiances of entropy created without skill or logic or intention, by accident, flawlessly, and you think even the intelligent algorithm that sets bosons aspin must have its slip-ups and loopholes, and you think, in your most self-indulgent fantasias of personification, that the laws of motion themselves must feel uncertain at times, and maybe the gods, too, are making it all up as they go along, and maybe one day, when she’s in her twenties, you can posit this hypothesis to your child over beers, and she’ll listen and roll it over inside her perfect, separate skull, and respond with a perspective on all of it that you’ve never in your half-century of life even considered, and maybe this, her mouth which is not your mouth over the head of her beer, will finally, for a moment, make you feel unalone.
A poem by Jennifer Jean
originally published in Poets/Artists in August 2011
Getting to Know You
Remember yesterday, when an 8.8 hit Chile
and the earth’s axis tilted?
800 died and
the days became shorter
by 1.26 milliseconds.
Remember before I met you? There was a time
they told me about you.
How the teenage you tossed grapes to hovering gulls
when out at sea. How you hooked one grape
and tugged a floating gull behind the tacking boat
called New Hope.
They told me you ate raw bacon.
How your mom made you
wear your hair in a bowl cut.
Now you’re blushing.
Thank you.
The days are longer
now.
originally published in Poets/Artists in August 2011
Getting to Know You
Remember yesterday, when an 8.8 hit Chile
and the earth’s axis tilted?
800 died and
the days became shorter
by 1.26 milliseconds.
Remember before I met you? There was a time
they told me about you.
How the teenage you tossed grapes to hovering gulls
when out at sea. How you hooked one grape
and tugged a floating gull behind the tacking boat
called New Hope.
They told me you ate raw bacon.
How your mom made you
wear your hair in a bowl cut.
Now you’re blushing.
Thank you.
The days are longer
now.
A poem by Kemi Alabi
Psych Ward Orientation
The night nurse folds gowns like flags atop caskets of the fallen.
The day nurse pours pills like malt liquor dedicated to the slain.
The bathroom doors don’t lock. The dinner knives tickle but do not cut.
They’ll say eat, and your tongue tastes dead flowers.
Muscle can’t weep for the skin--
too food now,
too lemon pepper and salt
to crane towards Mercury through all that fog
and scream, spin right.
They’ll say sleep, and actress, o Jesus’ new body,
the thorns pinning your eyes down heavy,
the yellowed room starring you and the bulb tonight.
They’ll say speak, and don’t dare ask
if they’ve seen your god
tiptoeing the halls,
giggling in closets,
a finger to his lips.
They’ll say speak, and your bandages
poke from your wrists and wink.
They’ll say speak, and your face is a cave
no one creeps inside--
they’ll wait for the hieroglyphs
scratched onto the walls
to be dug up with the rest
of the bones,
and you’ll wait for mistranslation
like any language
refugeed in this empire’s mouth
until your voice is the blueprint
of a conquered city leveled to dust:
the torched fields,
the plundered graves,
the photographs of ghosts.
You seem much better now,
they’ll say. I feel much better now,
says someone who sounds
like you.
Psych Ward Orientation
The night nurse folds gowns like flags atop caskets of the fallen.
The day nurse pours pills like malt liquor dedicated to the slain.
The bathroom doors don’t lock. The dinner knives tickle but do not cut.
They’ll say eat, and your tongue tastes dead flowers.
Muscle can’t weep for the skin--
too food now,
too lemon pepper and salt
to crane towards Mercury through all that fog
and scream, spin right.
They’ll say sleep, and actress, o Jesus’ new body,
the thorns pinning your eyes down heavy,
the yellowed room starring you and the bulb tonight.
They’ll say speak, and don’t dare ask
if they’ve seen your god
tiptoeing the halls,
giggling in closets,
a finger to his lips.
They’ll say speak, and your bandages
poke from your wrists and wink.
They’ll say speak, and your face is a cave
no one creeps inside--
they’ll wait for the hieroglyphs
scratched onto the walls
to be dug up with the rest
of the bones,
and you’ll wait for mistranslation
like any language
refugeed in this empire’s mouth
until your voice is the blueprint
of a conquered city leveled to dust:
the torched fields,
the plundered graves,
the photographs of ghosts.
You seem much better now,
they’ll say. I feel much better now,
says someone who sounds
like you.
A poem by Maggie Dietz
Pluto
Don’t feel small. We all have
been demoted. Go on being
moon or rock or orb, buoyant
and distant, smallest craft ball
at Vanevenhoven’s Hardware
spray-painted purple or day-glow
orange for a child’s elliptical vision
of fish line, cardboard and foam.
No spacecraft has touched you,
no flesh met the luster of your
heavenly body. Little cold one, blow
your horn. No matter what you are
planet, and something other than
planet, ancient but not “classical,”
the controversy over what to call you
light-hours from your ears. On Earth
we tend to nurture the diminutive,
root for the diminished. None
of your neighbors knows your name.
Nothing has changed. If Charon’s
not your moon, who cares? She
remains unmoved, your companion.
Pluto
Don’t feel small. We all have
been demoted. Go on being
moon or rock or orb, buoyant
and distant, smallest craft ball
at Vanevenhoven’s Hardware
spray-painted purple or day-glow
orange for a child’s elliptical vision
of fish line, cardboard and foam.
No spacecraft has touched you,
no flesh met the luster of your
heavenly body. Little cold one, blow
your horn. No matter what you are
planet, and something other than
planet, ancient but not “classical,”
the controversy over what to call you
light-hours from your ears. On Earth
we tend to nurture the diminutive,
root for the diminished. None
of your neighbors knows your name.
Nothing has changed. If Charon’s
not your moon, who cares? She
remains unmoved, your companion.
A poem by Melissa J. Varnavas
Song for the replacement fish
Now the red spikey one disappears itself.
In the next vase, the one with its tail tipped
too bright for its white body
turns to peer through lamp-lit layers of water dust.
It’s soft sway
stirs the murk. But they
make me
their captor
these shadows that swim
magnified
by glass, water. In their artificial ponds they go
around
and vanish
so not so much as a cerulean fin shows.
ξ
His favorite color is blue. He thinks its my favorite color, too.
That’s why he bought that one. It’s why he painted the hallway
that deep hue, so dark
I had to dabble over it with sky.
ξ
The first batch died. Turned over in their vases belly-up,
making the water yellow, their bodies
bleeding their brilliant color out.
I didn’t really want them, these replacement fish.
I look again and they are all gone, now
as they should have been
after the flushing and before the gift.
Song for the replacement fish
Now the red spikey one disappears itself.
In the next vase, the one with its tail tipped
too bright for its white body
turns to peer through lamp-lit layers of water dust.
It’s soft sway
stirs the murk. But they
make me
their captor
these shadows that swim
magnified
by glass, water. In their artificial ponds they go
around
and vanish
so not so much as a cerulean fin shows.
ξ
His favorite color is blue. He thinks its my favorite color, too.
That’s why he bought that one. It’s why he painted the hallway
that deep hue, so dark
I had to dabble over it with sky.
ξ
The first batch died. Turned over in their vases belly-up,
making the water yellow, their bodies
bleeding their brilliant color out.
I didn’t really want them, these replacement fish.
I look again and they are all gone, now
as they should have been
after the flushing and before the gift.
A poem by Regie Gibson
Godholler
Godholler // 1. n. A primal word. The first cry of creation. The sound from which all things manifest–––as in, Yes: the word his mother gave his father, in 1967, after he’d chased her for 8 years. Yes, there, in the cotton field, he, the father, wearing a halo of daysweat and dust. Yes: the word that became the kiss that became the tongue on the pulse that became the hand that turned up the transistor radio so Smokey Robinson and the Miracles could punctuate the newfound syllable with Ooooh, Baby, Baby becoming the baby they would have together, there, in that small Mississippi backwater they would soon leave for the promise of Chicago’s smokestacks and skyscrapers. 2. v. To loudly command with supreme and unquestioned authority––– as when the mother, like a carnival ventriloquist, sits with a deity on her knee making it mouth her “Thou Shalt Not’s”, or, when the father, fearing the son is gay, attempts to yell him into a “real man”. 3. n. The sound the boy, now a man with sons, attempts to muffle in his poetry.
Godholler
Godholler // 1. n. A primal word. The first cry of creation. The sound from which all things manifest–––as in, Yes: the word his mother gave his father, in 1967, after he’d chased her for 8 years. Yes, there, in the cotton field, he, the father, wearing a halo of daysweat and dust. Yes: the word that became the kiss that became the tongue on the pulse that became the hand that turned up the transistor radio so Smokey Robinson and the Miracles could punctuate the newfound syllable with Ooooh, Baby, Baby becoming the baby they would have together, there, in that small Mississippi backwater they would soon leave for the promise of Chicago’s smokestacks and skyscrapers. 2. v. To loudly command with supreme and unquestioned authority––– as when the mother, like a carnival ventriloquist, sits with a deity on her knee making it mouth her “Thou Shalt Not’s”, or, when the father, fearing the son is gay, attempts to yell him into a “real man”. 3. n. The sound the boy, now a man with sons, attempts to muffle in his poetry.
A poem by Rhina Espaillat
Prosody
The words are what I know,
but they are no comfort.
The comfort is in the music
that says what I cannot know.
The words are what I use
to make a map of the one place
there is, but it’s the music
takes me where I want to go.
The words are addresses,
but the things that live in them
have always just moved, and can be reached,
if at all, through the music.
The words are a name
for the shadow I dress in.
The radiance that wears me
answers only to the music.
Prosody
The words are what I know,
but they are no comfort.
The comfort is in the music
that says what I cannot know.
The words are what I use
to make a map of the one place
there is, but it’s the music
takes me where I want to go.
The words are addresses,
but the things that live in them
have always just moved, and can be reached,
if at all, through the music.
The words are a name
for the shadow I dress in.
The radiance that wears me
answers only to the music.
A poem by Tara Skurtu
Visiting Amber at Lowell Correctional
A windowless room. Mom and I
remove shoes, socks, spread our arms wide
between the cinderblock wall and locked door.
The guard takes a swallow of V8
before patting us down. Inside, I ask Amber
if this is a maximum security facility.
She tells me they’ve got her in here with murderers
like The Gardener—worked at a daycare,
killed a few kids there, buried them
alive. They gave her yard duty until
she began to name the trees she planted:
Josie, Maggie, Stephanie. Slicing deep
into her thighs, she mortared her wounds
with shit and got gangrene. In a wheelchair now.
Don’t wanna think about her no more, Amber says.
Seeing her every day is bad enough.
An inmate takes Polaroids, two dollars each,
acrylic wall paintings in the background.
One of an angel, feathers fanned out against a pastel sky.
Stand here, Amber says. I want you to have wings.
She’s to my right, our mother to my left. We smile big.
When I dream about my sister she’s a child,
in our Florida backyard, wide-eyed and silent.
She fills buckets with garden snakes,
catches strawberry-necked lizards
poised with the want of a mate.
With one hand she holds a wriggling lizard,
with the other she hinges its jaws open
then closed onto the lobe of her ear.
Visiting Amber at Lowell Correctional
A windowless room. Mom and I
remove shoes, socks, spread our arms wide
between the cinderblock wall and locked door.
The guard takes a swallow of V8
before patting us down. Inside, I ask Amber
if this is a maximum security facility.
She tells me they’ve got her in here with murderers
like The Gardener—worked at a daycare,
killed a few kids there, buried them
alive. They gave her yard duty until
she began to name the trees she planted:
Josie, Maggie, Stephanie. Slicing deep
into her thighs, she mortared her wounds
with shit and got gangrene. In a wheelchair now.
Don’t wanna think about her no more, Amber says.
Seeing her every day is bad enough.
An inmate takes Polaroids, two dollars each,
acrylic wall paintings in the background.
One of an angel, feathers fanned out against a pastel sky.
Stand here, Amber says. I want you to have wings.
She’s to my right, our mother to my left. We smile big.
When I dream about my sister she’s a child,
in our Florida backyard, wide-eyed and silent.
She fills buckets with garden snakes,
catches strawberry-necked lizards
poised with the want of a mate.
With one hand she holds a wriggling lizard,
with the other she hinges its jaws open
then closed onto the lobe of her ear.
A poem by Teisha Twomey
You will find your things
under my cradle. Some will be damaged,
others, ruined. I unraveled the woven wool
of cashmere stoles, tangled your bracelets,
teethed sunglasses and gnawed on stilettos.
I shook the necklace at your collar
and those unfettered pearls rolled
beneath me. My first word suits me well,
my baby-lips draw in to begin forming it
and my tongue clicks briefly against the roof
of my mouth when I say: Mine.
My sticky hands open and close
like hungry sundews, curling over
what’s dear to you. When you go,
you leave the door cracked
and I can hear your laugh. I want
to own this thing most of all.
You will find your things
under my cradle. Some will be damaged,
others, ruined. I unraveled the woven wool
of cashmere stoles, tangled your bracelets,
teethed sunglasses and gnawed on stilettos.
I shook the necklace at your collar
and those unfettered pearls rolled
beneath me. My first word suits me well,
my baby-lips draw in to begin forming it
and my tongue clicks briefly against the roof
of my mouth when I say: Mine.
My sticky hands open and close
like hungry sundews, curling over
what’s dear to you. When you go,
you leave the door cracked
and I can hear your laugh. I want
to own this thing most of all.
A poem by Timothy Gager
The Shutting Door
We are solid oak doors that shut
on our past, close on dead mothers,
sons, daughters. These doors swell
often, won’t open. One midnight
we walked towards woods, the moss
cold under our toes, as we were,
caught in the light for a moment;
a glimpse of half full. We are dim
lights on dark nights, sending out calls
to the wolves howling at the sun
because the moon hanging there,
yet never seems to hear them.
If I should need to step back to see
how you glow in this light,
illumination, I can be at one with that,
us, growing like violets in the dark.
The Shutting Door
We are solid oak doors that shut
on our past, close on dead mothers,
sons, daughters. These doors swell
often, won’t open. One midnight
we walked towards woods, the moss
cold under our toes, as we were,
caught in the light for a moment;
a glimpse of half full. We are dim
lights on dark nights, sending out calls
to the wolves howling at the sun
because the moon hanging there,
yet never seems to hear them.
If I should need to step back to see
how you glow in this light,
illumination, I can be at one with that,
us, growing like violets in the dark.
A poem by William Stratton
originally published in Untitled Country Review
My Father's Garden
You saw tomato plants through the snow, planned your garden
in February, moved the roto-tiller out into the frostbitten yard.
I was looking for evidence of spring in the frost lines,
shaking the frozen hose and wishing for more light.
Barrel-chested and hungry you
marked off rows and laughed
at my crooked lines. Now I watch
the nights shrink and think maybe
if I had learned a little more I could grow your body
by August, have you back for a summer storm.
On the porch your empty rocking chair moves.
This year I will take it into the yard and plant it by May.
originally published in Untitled Country Review
My Father's Garden
You saw tomato plants through the snow, planned your garden
in February, moved the roto-tiller out into the frostbitten yard.
I was looking for evidence of spring in the frost lines,
shaking the frozen hose and wishing for more light.
Barrel-chested and hungry you
marked off rows and laughed
at my crooked lines. Now I watch
the nights shrink and think maybe
if I had learned a little more I could grow your body
by August, have you back for a summer storm.
On the porch your empty rocking chair moves.
This year I will take it into the yard and plant it by May.