Tag: Poetry

So This Guy Is Selling Rolexes
by John Jeffire

I don’t want you to get
the wrong impression of me,
which, of course, means I
don’t want you to get
the right impression of me.
But that’s the point:
they weren’t real, the watches,
any fool would know that
anyone selling Rollies
on the sidewalk where the 375
exit ramp meets Madison Avenue
is straight fugazy, but the faces
were Rolex bold and the bands
caught the afternoon sun,
and I had $35 to burn.
The guy, he smiled a lot,
spoke like he had attended
Wayne State just up the street,
probably studied Marketing
or something like that,
what was not to like?
I peeled a couple twenties.
“Keep it,” I said, afternoon cool,
my teeth mirroring his,
jewels exploding with light.

Bonus audio of John reading his poem…

About the author:

Triptych with Love Story and Fire Season
by Jordan Ranft

It was finally time for you to come home
when Summer stuck its dry tongue into
October and fire charged us down the hill
facing your mom’s house. This wasn’t
your first evacuation, but it was mine.

                         We buy respirators and Mylar blankets,
                         dole them into plastic tubs with yellow lids.
                         Emergency rations and utility knives. Go
                         -bags perched near the Monstera you water
                         every other morning.

                                                  I lived in Oakland when fire jumped
                                                  the 101 and burned five thousand
                                                  houses to the studs. The next day,
                                                  I was going to drive North with
                                                  supplies, but someone broke
                                                  the driver-side window of my car.
                                                  I spent the day googling smoke
                                                  inhalation at the auto shop.

Flipped the breakers. Grabbed your grandpa’s
cowboy painting. In the distance, car horns
and smoke. You said our best bet was the backroad
that snaked along the black ribs of the lake.

                                                  You snuck past the evac line
                                                  to spray the roof with a garden hose.
                                                  It was the first time
                                                  you ever thought about buying a gun.

                         We are thinking about buying a gun.
                         Your hands are too small to pull the slide
                         back on a Glock. A revolver would be better.

                                                  During that first fire, we were dating
                                                  other people. She hated me, I hated
                                                  her but we hadn’t told each other yet.

We got your mom, grandma, and dog
into the car and drove to your friends’ house
on the hospital grid.

                                                  I heard a story about an old couple
                                                  who spent 12 hours in their pool as
                                                  their home burned down. They kept
                                                  each other company by telling the
                                                  story of how they met.

Before that, we were fucking in
your hotel room. You told me not
to say anything that might jinx this
and I didn’t say anything at all and yet…

                         You trim the lawn. I make the coffee.
                         This week promises temperatures in
                         the 90s. The hills are full of dead grass.

About the author:

Whine & Die
by Lasha D. Goodwin

My hair is never down,
even when I let it.

Though my mind is in the clouds,
voguing, as my afro bobs
to my favorite tune,
I remain vigilant.

Graciously, I gait
from place
to place
fragrant confidence
wafting in my trail,
taking up space.

My idiolect captivates you,
though I’ll admit—
it’s curated.
I’ve cracked the code,
Switching
Cause I ain’t finna be
misunderstood.

You heard me?
Good.

The bronze of my skin is a gift
from Mother Nature,
but I saw it sitting on a shelf
for sale.

At the dinner table, Mommy said
being yourself is a battle for the ages.
She armored me with love
and validation.

Still,
I am battered.

A Black Girl isn’t beloved
beyond her mother’s dining room.

I lose myself searching for me
in all the right tables.
I trade my worth for a living.
Sacrifice myself
and call it giving.

I sit at inherited tables
with fiends claiming the same hunger.

They feast on me.

But I don’t want to be consumed.

I felt the most satisfied sitting
at my mother’s table,
where she fed me
courage and confidence.

I never considered I’d be famished
at my own table,
where I am dished
defamation.

Now I conform—
no, contort
into a character that feasts
on platitudes served
from a greasy white box.

It’s tepid.

Yet I am expected to serve up
the best when this world expects
everything
and nothing
of me at all.

So no,
my hair,
though she reaches for the clouds,
is never down
because my guard
is always up.

I stand tall,
so when you knock me down,
my magnitude will resound
as I hit the ground.

I speak so I am understood—
never incompetent to the white man,
not siditty to your home girl.

My skin is too dark
to be beautiful
until it is a beauty standard
for an ivory corpse.

Mommy’s dinner table
fed my belief
that I am everything
and I am full.

With my head held skyward,
assurance in my stride,
clarity in my tone,
luminance in my complexion—

you’d never know
I am starving.

Bonus audio of Lasha reading her poem…

About the author:

From His Rib
by Kaycee Painter

He picked me like a fig from the tree
and said I was ripe for the taking.
His helpmeet, his harvest.

Said yes with my head bowed,
barefoot before the altar,
vows sealed in oil and song.
The spirit moved, they said, and so did I—
from daughter to wife, from vessel to vow.

My belly blooms each spring,
like the tulip bulbs I did not plant—
fruitful and multiplying like the word commands.
I am pregnant with our sixth.
He places his hand on my belly like a benediction
and says this is what it means to be fruitful.
I do not say I feel more soil than seed.
I do not say that I am tired.

He preaches gospel with one hand on my knee
and the other clutching scripture
like it might ascend without him— like I might.

I bake submission into biscuits,
lace grace into my daughters’ hair,
teach them to sit still and sing sweet
to hide their hunger in hymnals.
Blessed are the meek, I say, and they believe me.

But somewhere between the casseroles
and the christenings and the kneeling and the knowing,
I forget how to ask for more without it sounding like sin.

At night, I press my palm into the curve
of my daughter’s back, and whisper
not a prayer but a plea:
Let her speak with the tongue of Deborah.
Let her laugh like Sarah in the tent.
Let her dance undignified like David
and never be told she must sit still.
I named her Eve,

so she would know wanting was never the fall.

Bonus Audio of Kaycee reading her poem…

About the author:

Raccoon in Driftwood
by Sarah Suhr

It’s Easter Sunday
             & I am seeing the dead
having walked here to feel
             something old & familiar—

             an empty eye socket
lips forever fixed in a snarl
             fang forever wanton of flesh—

haven’t I said my heart
             is a millstone? Here’s nighttide
taking what it wants.

Bonus audio of Sarah reading her poem…

About the author:

All Standard Perils
by James King

            For Jenn

We will share the cruelty of every morning.
Every parting and arrival will come
in pairs, like socks or antiparticles
and particles that separate and return,
annihilating in all space. I will give up
a whole genre of poems—the kind
in which I have to leave you. No more
long drives home on a road made unfamiliar
by rain. Your books and my books,
now co-conspirators, will whisper together
in the language they’ve always known
but never had the chance to speak.
We might doubt whether the moon
will still show herself in our new bay window, but
she will teach us just as much from here,
remaining uncapturable, her grim beautiful seas.
I fear sometimes, when you hold me down
onto the carpet, you will feel the whole
breadth of my creature, the whole tusk and stubble
like that proverb of the elephant and the blind.
Other times I hope for it. I listen for the sound
of your voice from another room, of
the toilet tank too slow to fill. May we sleep
peacefully, but some nights let the dreams
keep our bodies awake and forgive
the church down the street, empty and barely
holy in its robe of snow—
let this reanimated life be the service
we give day after day after day.

About the author:

No Certificate   |   Todd  Epp

She carried the child
after it was gone.

Nebraska law said so.

No one asked her
what she wanted.

The doctor said
no certificate

and walked out.

She went home
with what remained.

My grandfather and his brother
found a place east of Henderson.

Black soil.
Corn rows.

No marker.
No paper.

Only what got told
in the family

and kept getting told.

Now the farm is gone.
Corn grows there.

Bonus audio of Todd reading his poem…

About the author:

The Sun and the Prison
    |  John Dennis

It comes in before the bolts are drawn,
not through the gates but through the glass,
a slow, deliberate spill of gold
across the floor of every cell.

It rests a while on the metal bed,
warms the thin blanket folded twice,
lays a quiet hand on a shoulder turned
too long toward the wall.

The sun
moves tier by tier, uncounted, unseen,
softening the corners of concrete thought,
touching the scar no one asks about,
the knuckles, the jaw, the held-in breath.

It polishes the dull of a steel sink,
coaxes a flicker from tired eyes,
lingers in the hollow of a name
spoken only in memory.

On it goes, patient warden of light,
through corridors humming with yesterday,
slipping past locks, past numbers, past files,
mending what it can without witness

a warmth in the chest that loosens the fist,
a brightness that edges regret into shape,
a steady insistence that time can move forward, even here.

It finds the ones who do not sleep,
sits with them through the longest hour,
leans through the bars like a listening friend,
says nothing, but does not leave.

In the yard it opens its wide, clear palm,
lets faces lift, lets shadows fall behind,
lays out a sky no wall can hold,
a brief and boundless reprieve.

And when the day has done its work,
when names are called and doors release,
when footsteps cross from counted ground
into the unmeasured air

the sun does not follow.

It pauses on the threshold,
sets its warmth in the hands that wait,
in the streets, the homes, the turning world,

and gives them back
not as they were,
but as they might yet be
to us.

About the author:

John Dennis was born in New York and moved to Sweden after being stationed in Italy while serving in the US Navy. He holds a Master’s degree in Pedagogy from Malmö University where he also studied Creative Writing. A stroke ended his teaching career giving him more time to write. He is married to Anna, father to Julia and grandfather to Noah.