Tag: poem

Bath & Aria | JC Talamantez

                                                —of false fruit, myth, and ingastration 

                      after they were connected
                      to him in solemnity

                                 and with the happenstance
                                 of their hearts always

                                            hungry for grist

           —he asked his friends to run the water cold in the tub

                      and unwind the prologue of antichrist

                                 while he slips unbidden / blindfolded
                                 below the cooling skin

                                            a slice of porcelain not quite
                                            bone in a kiln

                      —that they touch for a brief

                                 his loneliness / fill the belly
                                 of bits that

                                            he might know which part
                                            of the body it is

so it was like preparing food / the exultation and wreckage
of the pretty boy in the bath

           with the authenticity of his muted heart flashing

                      phonating over / the grievance

                                 of frozen peas from a spoon


           but for every prior day / spackle over it

                      and maybe for the linger of
                      a particular voice-color

                                 i was a child stomping about
                                 in gutter
                                 after rain           for it seemed

                                                            a great mystery was left in living
                                                            but also count the cost

                                                                     to be seen just as i am

           —we didn’t know yet, what was driftwood

                      or how the final note
                      would be

                                 shaken
                                 from the wire


                                                                                  —not for N.
     

Bonus audio of JC reading her poem:

About the author:

A Treachery of Trees | I Echo

after Demartravion “Trey” Reed

            In the ride, I know I am empty. Alone
In my demand for what continues &
            What will follow the treachery of trees.

                        All day I ride around with fruits juggling
                                    In the playground of my belly. There is
                        Water on the floor, I carry thirst in a jug.

            Outside, the trees have gone through
Gestation. Their hands now developed
            In the threading of ropes. They have

                        Mastered their hunger, more so how
                                    To harbor its decorum of dominion.
                        I try to avoid the lesson. Ride far

            From the quarrel of birds amongst
This banquet of bruise. I probe
            A door, & a hand meets me there.

                        It is all mine. This presence. This
                                    Abundance of annoyance for the
                        Length of a journey. I am not alarmed

            That we share a love of trees as much
As our hatred for this hour of agony.
            To be full of love too is to decline

                        What gathers the birds. When
                                     We switch mouths, we marinate
                        Our tongues, wounds dipped

            Into spirit. We become the source
Of our bruises. There is no measure
            For how much ruin a being can carry.

About the author:

Ode to the Guest Star | Kenton K. Yee

Browsing in my campus library I chance upon a colorful print
of what Chinese sky watchers dubbed (in ancient Chinese)
’The Guest Star’ because it burst into the blue in 1054 and

faded two years later as if it never existed. An 18th century
English astronomer, through a telescope, this time at night,
rediscovered it, a tangle of yellow-red and white legs around

a bluish face, and dubbed it ‘Crab Nebula.’ I love crab butter,
the yellow and lime-green gooeyness my mother let me eat
out of Dungeness crab carapaces bought in Chinatown and

steamed Fisherman’s Wharf style. Now halfway through grad
school, I haven’t sniffed crab steam in seven years. “We’re
meant to be,” I whisper. “Prepare to be cracked and sucked

out of your chitin.” The Crab and I blush. We’re in cahoots,
as only prey and carnivore can be, and we understand that I
will ravish him right here, in front of the library’s panoramic

windows for the universe to see. Beneath the main print are
ultraviolet and infrared images. In every image, the crab
looks battered and machete-hacked—like me. Below it all,

in black & white, ‘4500-6500 light years away’—its distance.
This is what art feels like, how truth and beauty, being un-
reachable, are likely millennia away from what’s rendered.

Bonus audio of Kenton reading his poem:

About the author:

barnacle of hope | Steve Minnich

there is a moment in the life
of every barnacle when

it does not know
if it will live or die

i don’t mean this
like how you or i

might succumb to terror
or despair but

at its cypris stage
the barnacle doesn’t eat

it just floats
hoping to crash

head first
into something

hard enough
to hold it

and hang on
for another

thirty years
or so

About the author:

Steve Minnich makes space for reading and writing in Richmond, Virginia. His work can be found in the pages of HAD, pioneertown lit, Sublunary Review, and elsewhere. He is co-editor of the zine Carry Water and would love to read with you. Thank you for reading.

Forget the Moon | Svetlana Litvinchuk

It’s been two years since we’ve danced
in the dark without a child between us.

Now that she dreams in her own bed,
we explore the strange land of our mattress,
the foreign landscapes of our changed bodies.

Our hands begin to remember the way.
Remember the secret language our hips
spoke to each other?

Even in the moonless dark, your whispers
found my ears. In the night’s sensory chamber
our hands see each other in a way our eyes
forget by daylight.

The braille of your spine beneath my fingertips.
The contours of your hands across my thighs.

We fill each other with breath, discover
the familiar in the strange landscapes
of deserted islands.

I urge my brain to abandon its thoughts,
pause this poem it insists on writing you,
forget the moon, all the wars outside
our door,

to let go so that I can hold you tighter,
as if to hold you is to hold the sky—
collapse the universe
between us.

Bonus audio of Svetlana reading her poem:

About the author:

8 Beautiful Things (About this Last Year) | Matt Mason

The way you used your car so little, the battery became a stone
that couldn’t spark even a speck in the overhead when
you opened the door, couldn’t make so much as a click
when you went to unlock the other doors with the switch.

The way you woke up
at 5am most mornings,
fully awake,
hoping there was good news.

The way, when the tree fell,
you cut a picnic
area from the emptiness
it cleared in your yard,
placed trunks and the widest
logs as stools, set yourself
there on summer afternoons
with a notebook and a cup of tea.

The way
cauliflower
is so surprising.

The way the dog smiles. The way he moves, room to room in the day:
to Sophia in Algebra class, to Lucia in Social Studies, you
in a flurry of emails and spreadsheets at the kitchen table,
your wife wrapping up teaching Composition to seventeen black squares on a computer screen; you, ma’am, he says knowingly, need to get outside,
take a walk.

The way of these cookies,
the recipe Lucia has been working
to get perfect.

The way there is at last a truce between days:
where Monday is essentially just one more Thursday,
Sunday another sort of Wednesday, the autonomy
of Tuesday’s declaration that it
is whatever it wishes to be.

The way of everything
you never imagined
you could miss
so much.

about the author:

d’Arc | Rebecca Oliver

I’ve known who Joan was for as long as I can remember;
she is in the stitching of my mothers’ memories.

Joan loved the bells,
girls her age from Domremy
(now Domremy-la-Pucelle)
told the courts this.

Joan had custom clothes
(we think she loved her clothes)
with more than twice the usual cording
as a protection from her soldiers
and later from her guards.

Joan heard angels,
she heard Catherine and Margaret
(Katherine and Maggie were in my grade),
and they were her confidants
in courts that examined her privacy.

Joan died when she was 19, because she
liked the bells, because her friends were
Katie and Marge, because she liked
looking nice, because she cut her hair.

You can still visit Joan’s house.

It’s her world, and we’re all livin’ in it,
all us girls who stop, who tilt our faces to
the sun when we hear vespers.

about the author:

More People Die in the Winter | Caroline Sutphin

We’re huddled at the hilltop, defensive hunch against
January’s meander goodbye, still lingering in the doorway.

Each shiver reminds me of the run in my hose crackling
up my leg only just concealed by my skirt hem,

calling my hand like the tide to the shore with each
Please Rise and Please Be Seated, the anxious smoothing

to keep it hidden beneath black polyester. My gray gloves
bleed splotchy as I wipe my nose. Blue Ridge wind

rolls through my lungs and slashes my eyes for looking up
at the elder oak tree hanging over the grave.

And as its permanence arrests my gaze, holding me steady
like a single blade of grass coated in dawn frost,

the last dead leaf that held on through Thanksgiving
and Christmas and three snowfalls, snaps like a gunshot —

free on the cloud currents, raptured away to heaven
before I knew to miss it. My eyes drop in shame

for the great oak’s nakedness, for the spray of flowers
trembling on the coffin, for the elastic thread unravelled

up my thigh. Up here on the hill, all this flesh living and
dead is so, so terribly, exposed.

about the author:

Callicarpa americana | Elizabeth Anguamea

The beautyberry’s fruit clings together
like a showy ball of cells. They leave
purple lacking, so bright their ripe bodies.
It is October, with highs in the nineties.
Everything sensible is dozing, deep in
summer dormancy, and I no longer feel
guilt for drinking my way through the
seasons end, cell-less womb yet empty
as the names I yearn to ascribe to you.
We watch military chinooks fly in asym-
metrical formation over the city, great
bodies slow as the bumblebees whose
lumbering grace at the yucca brings me
closest I’ve gotten to god in a while. We
sleep uncovered, ceiling fan ticks along.
You dream of flashes of light and I of buds
setting wild on the aster. An altogether
different sort of purple. Things will awaken
soon, life will climb up from her roots for
a final flourishing before toothed leaves
fall to the earth. Drupes will cling un-
abashed to beautyberry’s naked, arching
limbs. Chinooks will rumble languidly
over us at home while military aid rains
death on civilians abroad. Hurricanes
will tear inland as we choke down our
drought. It will be the hottest year on
record and I will be here, dormant as the
aster, trying to remember who we were
before they called us all purple.

about the author:

Routines | Rodrigo Toscano

Novella 14 | Rodrigo Toscano

about the author: