Car, Car C-A-R
Summer anthems of a cul-de-sac court
Squishy basketballs with asphalt gunk soar Flat
Above our heads,
And we leap HIGH,
High enough so we can brush the golden sun with Speckled leaves to match.
You’re two inches taller but I’m still older, And
December to February is the difference between Two
months and Two
years,
But between you the world and my reflection,
I feel little
Because my eyes are
naked, and
I still call the clouds what they are.
These are cumulus, but
They can change with the pressure systems coming in.
Hot and cold weatherman gossip
Fills a sky with
Piss and vinegar and
Condensation, and the air feels heavy because
I stuck my head in a jelly jar while
You said it was dirty,
And you showed me your romance
books while
I read you real history
And we both felt behind in
Our own times.
Aren’t star-crossed
teenagers too young to
Fall In Love?
is that what you dream?
Our wiffle ball home runs
whisper Major League
Grand Slams World Series,
Out of this park out of this world
Out of our minds
Because we feel our ponytails
Yank us back.
Never mind the kid
Jackie Mitchell,
Six strikes lucky, six strikes god,
Call it a spectacle, call her a story,
Make her a myth,
A powdered-nosed, skin and bones baseball nymph,
Who grew up in the end,
Like you, like me,
For how many hits do we have
Left?
The yellow leaves
Remind me.
Defenestration by Teddy Press
Soft amber light pours in through accordion pleats,
draping over the dust and debris.
I crack the window to release
the hot stale air from its heavy sealed cage.
My sweet breeze whips the shades
against the cedar window frame.
The fresh air does not cool me down.
The incessant noise infuriates me.
I am hot. I am sticky. I am insomniac.
I burn
harsh and bright.
I must kill
the sodium streetlights, stab their
bulbs and make them hemorrhage
hot gas the way that I spew out hot air
and pump rage from my vocal cords.
But the streetlights never flicker.
Mountain Creature, Man: One Year Ago Today by Rachel Hsu
I walk to you to remind my feet
the feeling of wandering without getting lost.
The echo of aimless rings like dreams, or so I’m learning;
we used to call it inevitable danger.
One year ago today, I couldn’t perceive this kind of love.
The year before that, I was dying to prove myself.
The year before, I insisted I knew something.
In a way, I did—not trust or path or people
(things I feel for in the dark now)—but I knew
the inkling of body. One could call that potential
for story from the start.
I march your hills with light in a sack and pretend
my footsteps water your eternity. One year ago today,
I could not name the bridges on your back,
nor could I tell you why
tiny things scatter the second they notice you looking.
I came to you for peace of mind in tiny bodies;
these are the only times I pretend you can hear me.
One year ago today, we did not know each other
the way we do now. We knew nothing of wander, explore, acquaint
because to meander was to begin confirming,
and confirmation comes from making mistakes.
People fear drifting like it’s sinking,
like it’s footsteps with footprints,
though that’s natural.
People are unforgiving, is what I mean.
But lately, I’ve been thinking, I can shift in the dark
without fear sometimes.
At some point, maybe, I learned, if I can feel something,
then I have hands. Trusting that
(and the one-way ticket footsteps)
is the kind of love I’m figuring out.
I’m figuring out that walking means my body can go;
I can tag along if I know how to follow it.
I walk to you the way I walk to my body when I want to go places.
One year ago today, I would have told you I knew what that meant.
I didn’t.
What I know is I walk to you now.
What I know is you’re a body of your own.
What I know is how to wander to you when my body says it needs a friend.
You’re the mountain, you’re forever,
body-in-the-dark. You’re destination
and pathway at once, like the body and all
in and about it—here the whole time, and
all I had to do
was find you.
Jesus Takes My Grandma to Prom by Mia Nelson
The Italicized lines come from “Confessions” by Saint Augustine of Hippo
If Jesus didn't dance like the first coming of Elvis
my grandma never would have
loved him so much.
Who amongst us could resist the smooth talking,
cowlicked hand of God
as it crept up our blue cotton-sack skirt?
The Great Depression must have been happening somewhere
else because when my grandma fingers her plastic rosary beads
she blushes like a millionaire's champagne headed
second wife, she makes church in 1935 sound like the party
Gatsby didn't have the balls to throw,
and who to believe about heaven better
than those who have nothing
but His hand asking for a dance?
Grandma's St Augustine candle says
Come, Lord, stir us up
& take the lead on the jitterbug
until my grandma's seventeen year old heart
is as yellow as holy light spilled
through the very last stained glass in Huérfano, Colorado
because even the hungriest farmers
can't chew glass or get full up on the Body alone.
Sacred sacrament of pillaging, keep safe the bust of
Saint Augustine who is patron of
all the weepy eyes that roll around
in her blue jean pockets. They keep watching and watching.
Surely it is enough that God comes
to the dance at all, even if a little late, even if a little tipsy
from the last dizzying near-miss of a generation.
Why doesn't anybody believe, my Grandma wonders
as she dies, and it's because nobody rages anymore
with the angels, no one is playing beer pong with Augustine,
or Auggy, or whatever frat name sounds best like midnight
baptisms in an ocean of sweet beer while stars blink and blink like irises. They don't make celestial bodies
like they used to, no more men of the people or
the son of God cutting it up with the lepers or lonely girls in
a middle of a nowhere dirt-poor desert town that means "orphan"
in English. When no one came for Grandma, Jesus took her to the prom
and got her on her knees when no other man or gun barrel could have
done it. I imagine she heard St. Augustine whisper Kindle and seize us,
be our fire and our sweetness. When the patron saint of hell raising
tells you to stir it up,
you never forget it. You dance alone in the house
long after He drops you off. Back in the day,
you could dream of God &
there'd he be.
Yacumaman by Monique Cummings
The leaves once coursing with rubber
make not a single crackle,
the dirt, not a whisper.
There is no tremor in the air
once heavy with drops of perspiration
and growth’s battle for light.
Her underbelly leaves stillnesssssss
makes the mighty Lupana shrivel
into the wisped sword plant.
She fills the overgrown place,
reducing it to slivers of insignificance.
And I watch the hexagons swirl in endless song.
the cyan honeycomb,
the cylinder of my existence
Her slithering whirlpool threatens the hairs
on a skin I cannot shed.
A coiled casket now sealed, seamless.
She smiles a scythe,
sepia tongue inciting a forked choice.
A forgotten breath catches in my esophagus.
the oldest emeralds,
slits that sear history
They are my soul guides to her ceaseless swivel
as the bed of dirt encrusted seeds succumbs
to my designed constriction.
her sensitive slink,
sends me sinking
Darker, heavier, freer;
Turquoise, Cerulean, Indigo;
until I am a statue in the deepest sand.
her home,
silenced by midnight’s waves leagues above
Cold’s careless caress,
creeps deliberate, like the age-old stone,
against the crevices of my marrow’s core.
but until the end
she lets me see
the symphonies of jade
stealing me
honor by Carter Welch
why act so melancholic on the shores of some great or little water
why pummel the brook in such grave anticipation
why demand recession, recension, rectitude
then the river pours over the Petoskey stone
then cameras shoot bullets into waves of nowhere
then glen arbor—peaceful prairie—disembarks
he wakes up on turbid coast
i look over, over, bat my lids windward
ask him how the sand rolls this way
i always knew
i learnt the stories of the mother and her cubs
in a dimly lit, warm brick schoolhouse down the shore
but he didn’t learn, not there
so i built the bridges between manitou and leelanau
demonstrated how they all crusaded
then burnt them with glass castle kerosene
watched the overpasses glow in the sunset
hounded them until their fiery demise, so that
they crumbled—ashen paper tigers—into sweetwater
the powdered sugar grey drank them up
orange extinguished to faraway polyester fog
and i turned to him:
this is how you do it
this is all i ever wanted
this is what i dreamt of
he reached to the bluff:
you take stock in the power of destruction?
you wish to destroy all prior innovation?
no, that’s not it at all
i only want the world to bear how a mother felt
when her cubs drifted to sea
and all she could do was stretch her body long
roar into the westerlies
then descend into blurred and battered sleep
This Bagel is Somewhat Stale by Alyssa Lebarron
This bagel is somewhat stale
I bought it at Novack, and thought it would ail
My hunger, and under
The thickened cream cheese
Is the crunchiest, toughest, worst bite of unease.
I drink the pumpkin drink that I have on the side
It’s iced, it’s spiced, it’s a bonafide
Accompaniment, which does make sense
It’s fluffy and sweet, compared to my dense
Bagel that isn’t able
To be eaten, rather, it sits on the table
Alone and upset that it isn’t still fresh
Because it let time pass by, while it sat and slept
So the lesson from this bagel, and I guess from me too
Is take advantage of the day that presents itself to you
Wake up! Let’s get it! Let’s do more today
So we don’t end up like the bagel that I just threw away.
Allegory with Question by Aleka Kroitzsh
I wanted to be like the owl:
raging layers so he could puff himself up to twice his naked body’s size,
head screwing around 180 degrees,
black winter eyes.
He perched on the thickest branch of the ponderosa pine.
I wasn’t equipped with wings like him.
I am a skin wearing, two-legged,
head that only screws around 90 degrees,
ground-bound creature.
I brought him a rat.
I couldn’t bear to kill it,
I left that to him. As he tore the rat’s squiggly intestines
from its small furry body,
I pulled out the burrito I had packed in my bag and sat near him.
I plunged my teeth into its wheat-skin,
sucking pink coleslaw into my mouth.
I gathered up the courage to ask the Owl a question—
a question that had been eating away at me.
“Teach me how to care less.
Teach me to kill.
And to fly away the way you do.”
The owl’s marble-black beady eyes locked with my wide ones.
He opened his beak and squawked loudly,
Spreading his black wings and fanning me with them.
“Teach me,” I pleaded,
“Things are so heavy here on the ground.”
The owl had reached the rat’s heart
And ate the pea-sized thing in a single beak-bite.
He waved his wings and soared,
Leaving me with the rat, gutted.
My heart beat fast and the rat’s didn’t at all:
The heart I had sold to the owl
In return for flying lessons.
I stared at it.
I realized that everything the owl had told me was true:
The rat was a ground thing
I couldn’t kill it,
I couldn’t have eaten its organs,
Especially its heart,
And flown away, leaving hallow soft skin in my wake.
I was a ground thing
Soft skin and edible heart
And I can’t digest life this way.