Tag: poem

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:

Low-key Midwest Girl Dad Vibes: My Wardrobe is Mostly Kohl’s Middle-Class Casual & My Skin Care Routine is $1.59 Men’s 2-in-1 Total Body Wash | Bob King

            For Izzy

But once a month the soap is on sale for
a-buck-29 so I usually stock up in threes,
& only once it was Buy-One-Get-One
& yes, I still carry regrets that I didn’t
get more. When I think about it, my
college freshman & her friends use
low-key far too often & mostly incorrectly
because OMG, Tiffany, there’s nothing
low-key about having a drink thrown
right in your face. And Oh my god, Becky,
look at her butt has never bounced from
their boom boxes & that’s truly a low-key
tragedy. Most things are BOGO when you
stop & think about it. Nonbiodegradable 
blue bags with every supermarket trip
& lingering regret is free with every pint
of Ben & Jerry’s. Cortisol with every cup
of coffee, which is weird because why
would you want to trigger a stress hormone
when you’re low-key trying to destress
from another restless night of sleep
spent overthinking all the things
you cannot control? Bro. That’s
a low-key bummer. With every
Amazon box that is set to arrive
on your front porch also arrives—
at no extra charge—anticipation.
Anticipation of, Did it come yet &
what’s the hold-up & wait this isn’t
the size or color or fit & I better low-key
hide this before a neighbor or loved-one
makes another comment about my
spending habits. Honey, I don’t think
the UPS man thinks about you, your
boxes, or what might be in your boxes
as much as you give him low-key credit for,
so that’s another part of the complex loyalty
rewards program, as if loyalty itself is ever
really rewarded in the noncommercial
sense. You really didn’t buy the house,
your bank did, & when you’re done paying
them back, they’ll pay their bank back, &
that bank will pay its bank, & eventually,
depending on your system of government
& afterlife, someone is paying, plastering
over, creating another layer for a future
archaeological excavation where a future
civilization is going to make wildly
complex & yet-also-incredibly-oversimplified
conclusions from inadequate evidence,
evidence that suggests cave art isn’t
cave art at all, but an early representation
of a stop sign, as in: Proceed no deeper
into the cavern because deeper is where
the bears sleep. Someone is paying
the piper & if not well then you’re gonna
have to hire that injury & malpractice
attorney with the billboards & commercials
all over town, because nothing says I’ll
make them pay like a baldpate & arched
eyebrow. Or as when that French philosopher
said, When you invent the ship, you also invent
the shipwreck; when you invent the plane
you also invent the plane crash; and when
you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.
Every technology carries its own negativity,
which is invented at the same time as technical
progress. Like when you bought the patriarchy,
you not only bought institutional misogyny,
but you also placed men in competition
with each other, perpetual cutthroats,
even as when a grandfather looked at
his adult grandson with an infant in his
arms, diaper bag slung over his shoulder,
drippy-nosed toddler hiding behind
his knee, & questioned what men had
become, just two generations removed
from what he thought stern reticence
could buy. Yes, when you save money
at one store, that enables you really
to splurge on things at other stores,
Girlmath you think, you think as you
cry, standing under the new Lowe’s
showerhead—maybe a Cure song
about boys not crying on the portable
speaker—a low-key power-washer,
epidermis-remover, an extravagance.
But, admittedly, this is only a low-key
understanding of how economics
or emotional intelligence might work.

+Inspired by Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher (2024), On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed (2021), “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot (1992), Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins by Lee Berger & John Hawks (2023), & “Boys Don’t Cry” by the Cure (1979).

about the author:

They Put the Graffiti On | Matthew James Babcock

they take the graffiti off
around here, when every
autumn sky rusts at dusk

and every blue prelude
of swollen moon
brings symphonic gusts

of spring sunrise and stricken
willows swaying as if
kicked about in hurricanes

where the same untended
riverside walkway ends
near the standing shell

of a refurbished building
that was a soft yogurt shack,
was a cheap burger joint,

is now a Hawaiian grill.
The trouble with surfaces
is another surface surges

beneath the first, so no
crust of carbonized pain
contains the luminous

lava of overflowing
laughter, like restraint damming
urge. Ever the slow march,

ever the upward dermal
thrust of layer purging layer,
as no obscene slogan

in hot pink paint, swerving
like the sexy hieroglyphics
of the future across

the steel footbridge arch,
escapes the disc grinder
scouring its temporary face

to a spinning shower
of orange sparks that hiss
into the river still throbbing

like a vandal’s vein.
Before the palimpsest heart,
before onionskin lung,

before busted plumbing
stained deranged watercolors
on drywall backstage

or translucent dandelion
leaves glowed in
black asphalt ruptures

like the savage signatures
of mad street mages,
where did the angry

and disillusioned scrawl
their fluorescent green rage?
On what insubstantial

page of fresh black primer
in refinished space?
Lash quickly, scribes and taggers.

Deface and be replaced.
No phase is more than erasure,
no displacement less than trace.

Bonus audio of Matthew reading his poem…

about the author: