Posts for June 1, 2015

Patrick Maloney
Category
Poem

Burnout Apology

Dear Dude I Just Met,

Sorry I was so blunt
about you being full
of shit while I blew out
your blunt.

Yours Truly,

That Asshole


Category
Poem

A Rave from a Man on a Boat I

The sea is shining at eleven’o’clock.
Here trapped in a vessel half-sunk
I speak to the wind.
 
Zephyr approaches from all corners
its sweet and smells of clover.
She haunts me from all locations.
 
Still pierced in the back of my mind
her eyes mirror the sky, she whispers
wake up, and see Olympus.

Jonel Sallee
Category
Poem

I Thought of Whitman

I Thought of Whitman

 

I watched the ripples widening on the pond today,

So many, thousands it seemed,

Forming, spreading, meeting,

Merging, resolving

Into the larger pattern.

And I thought of Whitman—those ceaselessly

Widening circumferences of his, so full of life,

So full of energy, so boundless

In their expansion; and I wondered 

Whether we, too, are the rain—our minds,

Perhaps our spirits, if you believe in such a thing—

Widening out

The way Walt said, the way the pond does

As each droplet joins the swirling dance;

Whether we, too, expand and meet and merge,

And if we do—

What then?

 

Jonel Sallee

 

Jennifer Barricklow
Category
Poem

Letting go

some things seem to stick with a body

longer, the way a small bone

goes sideways in the throat and becomes

lodged


Bianca Bargo
Category
Poem

Things with Me & Spiders: 1. The killing rules

Things with Me & Spiders

1. The killing rules

Outside? Never.

They’ve got business

to be about and it’s

none of mine.

I browse branches

for their webs like

a window-shopper;

I drive them to drink

the mosquitoes dry,

every     last       one.

Indoors, it all depends:

on my hair or skin

it won’t end well—

I can’t account for

instinct.

But I give them quarter

when I don’t feel

vulnerable—if

they’re small

or slow or in

seldom used

rooms.

Once, I let

a black widow

grieve in

my garage

for all her

natural

days.

 


Michelle Knickerbocker
Category
Poem

We Sleep on Paper

The crisp lined sheets
clean and empty
wait to embrace
the soft, tired form;
Ready to re-ignite
dreams and quell hunger
after fire-drill orbits
and polished scullery days
We are gingery thoughts
and lemony emotion,
the ebony inkpot
of smoky imagery laid
onto a bare plate:
Our bed is the poem.

 


Category
Poem

the mutation.

you are seven years old
the first time
you realize
you have powers
morgan&alex say
 
you are a liar
so as evidence
you show them
you can turn yourself invisible
 
on saturday
you walk around your apartment
kicking walls
slamming doors
screaming & screaming & flinging yourself on floors
 
but your mother looks through you
swatting at space around her head
as if brushing away
a stench

Amanda Holt
Category
Poem

A Marigold

This time

Last year

He knelt beside me,

rolling one from the starter tray like I would roll my comfortable thumbs

over his knees when we drank coffee

on summer mornings.

 

We dug in together, both smeared with the compost-stinking soil

from the plants before that had stained our jeans,

muddied our faces.

 

Those

marigolds bushed—yellower than the summer squash blooms—

20 to a single plant, and their fruiting neighbors

Couldn’t even escape the rabbits.

 

I remember his uprooting the woody scrags

A few months later

when the flowers wrinkled into clots and dropped—

a few weeks before he left—

Tossing them behind the shed

With other remnants of once-beautiful things.

 

The worms churned the barren raised-bed for weeks.

Then, I saw them—green blades spearing the damp dirt—

Growing back.

I scraped them all from the garden.

Hurled them away.

“Not yet!” I cried after them.

 

But I’ve never begged something that listened.

 

I saw one today,

Thumb-sized, hiding under the cherry tomatoes I eventually planted

When the soil’s rawness ebbed.

It found its way to the water,

Was holding its one red bloom like an arrow

Under a new, green tomato testing its weight.

 

I let it be all summer.

You cannot remove something that demands to be present.

 

And, I imagined, it made the new tomatoes taste sweeter.


Gaby Bedetti
Category
Poem

A Failed Rescue

My cat finds a spider—
my spouse says he’ll rescue the creature.
“Oops! a shoe fell on it.”


Amanda Corbin
Category
Poem

Ultrasound at the High-Risk Clinic

bones, kidneys, and brain

on a screen we see it through the skin

wrinkled and porous like a sponge

 

five and a half pounds

and lots of hair, they say

the technology gets better every year

 

four chambers whooshing blood

we hear the echo through the room

hollow like a steel drum

 

then, what we came to hear:

no signs of defect—

he didn’t get his daddy’s heart

 

it must be mine he’ll keep