Tag: poem

Biotic | Adesiyan Oluwapelumi

The wind hosts a funeral.
I don’t feel too alive.
My heart whitewashed in bathwater.
I peel clean at the edge
of the butcher’s sabre. My haemorrhage
blushes. This is how
I remind you what I am?
What am I? I can’t discern
if the air is mourning or celibate.
The way my fingers mold the knolls
on my face like wild radishes.
Every touch retches me. I confess
and it is blasphemous.
I quiet and it crackles a potter’s
clay. I vase into forsythias
and the fuchsia rots.
I sit by a pool and feel the water.
Its inferno engulfs me. I mouth a cigar
and its smoke thins into a thread
crotcheting my veins. Nothing should
have to suffer this way. Not
the ellipsis groaning in my throat.
Again, God heaves into my sutures.
My carapace, like a gill, exhaling
stale air. The air is stale.
My bones a cracker of dry leaves.
In a pocket of blunt knives,
the lungs still wound.
My tremor is wolfsbane—light
sinewed in the silver of full moons.
I must burn. I am something alive.

About the Author:

Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet & essayist from Nigeria. Winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Contest(2022) & 1st runner up in the Fidelis Okoro Prize for Poetry(2023), he and his works are featured in 20.35, Fantasy Magazine, Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales & elsewhere.

After the Bombing | Eneida P. Alcalde

Because our fathers mixed cocktails
and lit these in protest

while their friends bled dying
or tortured after the coup.

Because our fathers fled to escape
the abuse of citizens inflicted in

the name of order. Because our fathers learned
missing often means forever gone and no

votes are often erased. Because our fathers
despised the glare of European skin.

Because our fathers sought peace and equality and
risked their precious lives. Because our fathers

carried loaded guns when they picked us up from school.
Because our fathers knew we had to leave and

left everything behind. Because our fathers
learned English while scrubbing toilets and stripping chickens.

Because our fathers steered tractors over millions of miles to
fill our mouths. Because our fathers

mastered blue-collar schedules
and introduced us to Chomsky, Malcolm, and Wounded Knee.

Because our fathers hooked their backs to give us
healthcare and safer lives.

Because our fathers died, slipping into
specters of who they were. Because we are their

children, we know the first step is to
remember.

About the Author:

Eneida Alcalde’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in literary outlets such as Pirene’s Fountain, The McNeese Review, Zone 3 Literary Journal, and Huizache. A Macondista, she graduated with an MA in Creative Writing & Literature from Harvard University’s Extension School. Eneida’s poetry draws inspiration from her young daughter as well as her Chilean-Puerto Rican roots and the places she has called home. Learn more at www.eneidaescribe.com.

Incoagulable | Lucy Walker

Heat sweeps under the door jamb. Outside a car alarm.
Every half hour. The air brings the leaves to the window,
a spider about to drop into the alley. I could have loved it,
a life so small and dark like a pearl. Oyster smooth.
I hear young women laughing next door and it’s fuzzed
like an ultrasound. Remember the ferry rides? Remember
the geese in the empty cornfield? I can’t remember your voice
and you haven’t left yet. Last night, I undercooked the cake.
The center was bright yellow and wobbling. I couldn’t find
the right flowers, store after store, each face was too small
and smelled of nothing.

About the Author:

Lucy Walker is a Vermont poet. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has work published in Bodega Magazine, PANK, and Hole in the Head Review.

(Non)detrimental Reliance | Esther Ra

I want to believe I see what is broken
because once I had seen what is whole. Far-off,
fragmented memory, from which I jerked awake
shivering, spitting pinecones, snapped twigs
like toothpicks in my teeth. My whole life
I have sewn in the cloak of your mouth,
sifting dark stones, searching for honey. Tell me
this is more than naivete; more than dreamwalk
through dross and debris. So often I would stare
at the skies full of dust & the swirl of gray hair
& snow dropping quietly on my city, feeling
a hunger too common to name. They say home
is where you no longer try to escape. Lately,
I’ve been seeing doors in everything: a glass poem,
a kind smile, my name thawing in somebody’s mouth.
I have tasted you, resinous, rich with woodsap &
promise of spring. I cast my life on your waters.
Your hand lifts, flaming, torching
the dark: the first traveler, pointing us home.

About the Author:

Esther Ra is a bilingual writer who alternates between California and Seoul, South Korea. She is the author of A Glossary of Light and Shadow (Diode Editions, 2023) and book of untranslatable things (Grayson Books, 2018). Her work has been published in Boulevard, The Florida Review, Rattle, The Rumpus, Bellingham Review, and Korea Times, among others. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, 49th Parallel Award, Women Writing War Poetry Award, and Sweet Lit Poetry Award. Esther is currently a J.D. candidate at Stanford Law School. (estherra.com)

Faraway | Jim Peterson

Shin-deep leaves
cover the path. The soles
of my feet arch
over the hard surface roots
of maples.
The trail wanders
like a rope tossed in the air
down the slope
to the hub of a three-
spoked wheel of run-off
gulches, one of them
continuing down
to finally drain
into Blackwater Creek.
The center of this hub,
hidden from nearby
roads and yards
by the folding hills,
is where I stand.
I feel faraway
as if in deep forest.
Three deer, frozen
among the winter
birches, have seen me
many times, but still
they keep a close watch,
their black eyes
casting me
in the spell of these woods.
I’m turning on the axis
of the wheel of this place,
the trees spiraling up
into their high,
winter-stripped canopies
catching the last
elongated traces of sun,
the last breezes crawling
among the dead leaves
still holding on up there—
still capturing the first cold particles
of night, coming on.

About the Author:

Jim Peterson has published the novel Paper Crown from Red Hen Press in 2005 and seven poetry collections, most recently The Horse Who Bears Me Away from Red Hen Press in 2020 and Speech Minus Applause from Press 53 in 2019.  His collection of short stories, The Sadness of Whirlwinds, was published by Red Hen late in 2021.  He retired as Coordinator of Creative Writing at Randolph College in 2013 and remains on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Omaha MFA Program in Creative Writing.   He lives with his charismatic, three-legged Corgi, Mama Kilya, in Lynchburg, Virginia.