snowdrops

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Snowdrops
–Sandra Lim

Spring comes forward as a late-winter confection, and I cannot decide if it advances a philosophy of meekness or daring.

This year’s snowdrops: is it that they are spare, and have a slightly fraught lucidity, or are they proof that pain, too, can be ornate?

Even a propped skull is human nature. And its humor is monstrous, rich with an existence that owes nothing to anyone.

Fat little pearls against the ice, battering softly, try even fewer qualities—

To say that you love someone or something to death is to hover around the draw of irrevocability.

More faith is asked of us, a trained imagination against the ice-white.

 

Photo by Aditya Vyas on Unsplash

sunflowers

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Sunflowers in the Median

–Natalie Homer

Everything is a union of one kind or another.
Foothills know this. Highways too.

In the median—wild sunflowers for miles.
Cheerful, unassuming. They are no one’s bouquet.

My dad and I try very hard to seem at ease
with each other. We comment on the bison

stampeding across the casino’s electric sign.
Pixilated, their clouded breath leads them

again and again over an imagined prairie.
Later I will make this drive every day,

memorize little landmarks: the row of cottonwoods,
the peaked shelter at the reservoir’s edge,

the water towers marking the reservation.
I will become so sick of the sagebrush,

the snow and the sun, an incessant blue sky,
that I’ll wilt to think of this place being home.

But today it’s a morning I’m not sorry to be awake for,
so that’s something. And no one mourns a coyote

with his russet head resting on the road’s shoulder.
Neither does the ditch fire elicit sympathy.

The sunflowers did not teach me this,
but their small faces look so cheerful

bouncing in the slipstream of traffic—
I will believe anything they say.

halfway

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Halfway

–Paula Mendoza

You were between two animals.
Between two attributions.
At the crotch of a river’s fork.
At a loss, at least.
Between all losses, tendering alms.
By the skin of one’s stolen teeth.
The lethargy of one newly shorn.
To derive, say, attenuate, say
starved to a taper. A porousness.
False asphodel if aphasic, if sticky.
Vaseline-smear a focalization.
Ocean maw and mountain blade
recede. At last, at least—this. A figure
gathers line and edge. She is between
two roars. Who devours or drowns.
Say shore when you mean precipice.
Say split when you mean in pieces.
Redoubled at the jut of some far
becoming. Between, to say the least.
A shade and its absorption. To
swatch a sea’s phonemes, to score
what of light she keeps to let through.
Photo by David Clarke on Unsplash

work without hope

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Work without Hope

–Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
         Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

flight training

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flight training

–Shayla Lawz
sometimes i want to ask the earth,
was it beautiful          here
without us

or maybe you were lonely too

my nephew asks me why his paper airplane
never really flies    from here

& i ask the same of our bodies
is it the vessel; is it the way that we’re made
was the sky all lilac & orange for you too

how many nights have i been
at this window & when did it become a door
lately, i’ve been dreaming
evacuation;

of catapulting to a bright moon
& all this grief turned to
dust
to ocean
to blue light

all this dreaming makes me wonder
if there’s always been a sky
this close

in the air i am briefly starlit
& everything
is alive

Photo by Michael on Unsplash

what bodies move

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What Bodies Move
–Kristene Kaye Brown

Let the world come hungry at me.
Let the hours learn the tender curve

of this neck. For so long I’ve wanted

to believe that I’m made of star stuff,
a glittering spigot

funneled from the blue spiraling arms
of our milky way.

I hear
the clap of hands inside my chest.
I swallow. The body

softening against it. Who hasn’t wanted

to climb atop a roof and jump,
prove we too can come back

like the tulips after a bitter winter. A small body
pulled from dark,

a city of animated dust. I believe
sleep is night’s apology for day,

dreams the only respite from dark. I dream

of fog, fog slowing morning minutes.
Another day drained. Still,

there has only ever been one setting sun,

one rotating light chasing one unreachable
horizon
for billions of years.

A small good miracle,
were I swallowed into a black hole

I could live without shadow. I could live
inside that sunless system of tunnels.

I would be fine

dying there. And still, there is the question:
More god or less?
Me, I could go either way.

I have been told
that nearly all the atoms in the oxygen

we breathe
and the carbon in our skin

fell from the hydrogen furnace of a star,

which makes us less star stuff and more
nuclear waste,

weeds in a field of buttercups.

Photo by Diana Parkhouse on Unsplash

The Extravagant Stars

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The Extravagant Stars
–Nicole Callihan

Everybody says the stars are dead.

By the time the light reaches us blah blah blah.

As if the light itself is not enough—

Or maybe everybody says most stars are dead? Or some of the people say all the stars are dead, and all of the people say some of the stars are dead.

Is the sun dead?

I don’t know. I can’t remember.

1 in 2 women can’t remember 1 in 2 things.

I have all these “facts” in my “head.”

These “claims” about the “world.”

Caterpillars, supernovas, the days getting shorter, longer again.

The riverbed. Our great confluence.

The buzz of that particular fly.

Did you ever get my postcard from Mexico?

Mostly, I write the same word over and over, and mostly that word is light.

I keep saying, it seems very unlikely that this will kill me.

But why unlikely?

Medically speaking, you have a 1 in 500 chance of being born with 11 fingers or toes.

I had a student once without thumbs.

I wanted him to write a poem about it.

He used his hands like lobster claws; he made me so sad. Or I was so sad, and he reminded me of my sadness.

He didn’t want to write about his thumbs, he said. Okay, I said.

Probably he wrote about outer space.

Some years after that, I had a terrible late-term miscarriage and had to go to a terrible late-term abortion clinic with terrible, terrible lighting. Afterwards, they gave me a rootbeer-flavored lollipop. I sat in a blue chair and sucked on my lollipop. I was an old woman and a little girl. I cried audibly. I was in my prime.

1 in 4 women this. 1 in 8 women that. 1 in 15 women thisandthat.

And yet, the death rate of stars is only one about every 10,000 years or so.

Meaning, the naked eye will probably never see a dead star. You’re looking into the past, yes, but it’s unlikely, though not impossible, you’re seeing a dead star.

Looking into the past is like sticking your thumb in the dirt of a Dixie Cup.

But a high-powered telescope changes everything.

I think what I’m saying is: I’d rather live than not live.

When I was writing about my terrible late-term miscarriage, I gave a reading on the upper eastside. Afterwards, several women came up to me to tell me I was brave. So brave, they said.

I didn’t want to be brave; I wanted to be brilliant.

In hindsight, this strikes me as incredibly dim-witted.

1 in 1 women will look back on something and feel foolish.

Now, I will take brave any day.

I will take brave and fold it into my little kerchief and tie it to my stick and carry it to the top of the highest hill I can find, and when I get there, I’ll rest my tired legs, unwrap my little hunk of pie from its wax paper, and stare up at the brilliant, extravagant stars, knowing that they are not dead, not even one of them, not dead at all, but living, pulsing, pressing their light as far as it can reach.

Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash