poetry

blue heart baby

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Blue Heart Baby
–Joy Priest

Everyone wanna put hands on a piece of your life.
Look at it: how it sags in the eigengrau,

like the yellow belly of a bitch heavy with litter.
No better than that meddlin-ass moon, full

as your own breast, hanging low between buildings.
People hang from the chords your heart has let down.

The chaos of stars feel up the dead air. Tiny blue flames
in the eye bone of the young-old junkie girl

follow you around the floor of your humming days. &
have you seen yourself? I think I am weak & without purpose,

your father texts you from the kitchen, sauced up,
after he rolls his heavy body over the loaded pistol

he laid on your bed. Get use to life. Every piece
of advice is one the giver followed to his own

bitterness. You roll the heavy body of the car you loot
from your failed fiancé down the highway. Even

the wheel, wobbling with fury, insists on hanging on,
you must make it to each new mourning alive. Beyond

your silent mouth, what can you use to protect yourself?
The deceitful company of crowds will fail you, have you

out here with your young body, in the cold, a house
dress, barefoot on some other woman’s back porch

where no one knows the address. Let it be,
if this moment is of use to your life. & how long

is a moment in time, indistinguishable as speed—
peep the ant-sized airplane creeping across the crescent.

How to wake up the next day & the next & not simply
after a decade? After 13 blue moons? Stretched belly &

empty veins? The gas of constellations run out. Heart weighted
low in the sky. Your chances scattered across the dead years.

 

Photo by William Daigneault on Unsplash

solstice

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Solstice
–Michael McGriff

Photo by Boyan Lepoev on Unsplash

 

wild is the wind

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Wild is the Wind
–Carl Phillips

About what’s past, Hold on when you can, I used to say,
And when you can’t, let go, as if memory were one of those
mechanical bulls, easily dismountable, should the ride
turn rough. I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge —
metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though
the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent
much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un-
knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously,
a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was
just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary
taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what’s plain, snow
from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge
every few or so seasons, and — just once — a runaway child
whom I gave some money to and told no one about,
having promised … You must keep what you’ve promised
very close to your heart, that way you’ll never forget
is what I’ve always been told. I’ve been told quite
a lot of things. They hover — some more unbidden than
others — in that part of the mind where mistakes and torn
wishes echo as in a room that’s been newly cathedraled,
so that the echo surprises, though lately it’s less the echo
itself that can still most surprise me about memory —
it’s more the time it takes, going away: a mouth opening
to say I love sex with you too it doesn’t mean I wanna stop
my life for it, for example; or just a voice, mouthless,
asking Since when does the indifference of the body’s
stance when we’re alone, unwatched, in late light, amount
to cruelty? For the metaphysical poets, the problem
with weeping for what’s been lost is that tears
wash out memory and, by extension, what we’d hoped
to remember. If I refuse, increasingly, to explain, isn’t
explanation, at the end of the day, what the sturdier
truths most resist? It’s been my experience that
tears are useless against all the rest of it that, if I
could, I’d forget. That I keep wanting to stay should
count at least for something. I’m not done with you yet.

 

Photo by Sachina Hobo on Unsplash

a double rapture

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A Double Rapture
–Anna Swir
Because there is no me
and because I feel
how much there is no me.

Photo by yousef alfuhigi on Unsplash

Charon’s Obol

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Charon’s Obol
–Madeleine Wattenberg

My father gave me a small jar of honey
and each night I took a secret lick.
Long after the gold hardened to granule
my tongue returned to my mouth sweet.
Later he placed between my lips a sliver of peach
or a white pastille
dissolving down—homeopathic moon.
I kept my tongue clean beneath those gifts.

My tongue has since turned.
Sliding against the edges of men,
I wonder where that gold’s gotten to
and settle for a boy who tastes of copper,
who flaps like a whiskey-watered hawk
and scatters me.
I know you don’t mean it—I’d repeated,
until he refused me passage in his horror.
Empty anther. I wash him off with mint.
His sorrys fill my bed until I’m crowded out.
I count them like coin and at night they rattle.

We hope sounds will open our mouths
and force us into breath. I place a coin
across my tongue and practice dying.
In some cold places, the obol staves
return. My lips seal in the acerbic promise;
whole rivers run through me.
How can I know which boat to board—
I’m just trying to pay my way.

He removes the coin from my mouth
with his own hand. My sordid god.
But this is nothing new, this reaching into
and withdrawing. The truth is
I’d tongue the honey from most any hand
that granted me a crossing.

Photo by Art Rachen on Unsplash

 

 

milk tree

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Milk Tree
–Laura Kasischke

Heavy fruit
on bony branches
full of the knowledge one always encounters
too late
at the end of a life. Some

aspirin mixed with water, and a mouse
born in a dream. The sounds my son
once made while suckling. That, made
manifest. Little
milksop
and myself. Our

bodies, temporary
shelters, rented
breath. Not even
here long enough
to lament.

Today the breeze wears a fern:

Shiver
and living in the world, in
your brief green dress.

The amputated breast, like
a soul made out of flesh.

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

binds

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For What Binds Us
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they’ve been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There’s a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

 

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash 

advice for former selves

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Advice for Former Selves
–Kate Baer

 

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

remembering

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Remembering
–P.K. Page

Remembering you and reviewing
our structural love
the past re-arises alive
from its smothering dust.
For memory, which is only decadent
in hands like a miser’s
loving the thing for its thingness,
or in the eyes of collectors who assess
the size, the incredible size, of their collection,
can, in the living head, create and make
new the sometimes appallingly ancient present
and sting the sleeping thing
to a sudden seeing.
And as a tree with all its leaves relaxed
can shiver at the memory of wind
or the still waters of a pool recall
their springing origin and rise and fall
suddenly over the encircling basin’s lip—
so I, remembering from now to then,
can know and see and feel again, as jewels
must when held in a brilliant branch of sun.

the day

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The Day
–James Schuyler

Photo by Ari Apple on Unsplash