poem

divorce

bird taking flight off a rooftop
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Divorce
–José A. Alcantara

He has flown headfirst against the glass
and now lies stunned on the stone patio,
nothing moving but his quick beating heart.
So you go to him, pick up his delicate
body and hold him in the cupped palms
of your hands. You have always known
he was beautiful, but it’s only now, in his stillness,
in his vulnerability, that you see the miracle
of his being, how so much life fits in so small
a space. And so you wait, keeping him warm
against the unseasonable cold, trusting that
when the time is right, when he has recovered
both his strength and his sense of up and down,
he will gather himself, flutter once or twice,
and then rise, a streak of dazzling
color against a slowly lifting sky.

our home’s slow demolition by vine

dandelions
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Weeding
–Dan Rosenberg

I shove through bush and bed,
stumping along our house. Somewhere
I learned not to let the plants grow
too close, something about air flow, rot,

our home’s slow demolition by vine.
I wrap my hand around a dandelion,
pull into the tension, breathless
for the slight snap of roots, then harder,

until the earth releases it, or it gives up
its hold on the ground. I sunder
something deep, throw the plant
with its knot of dirt

to the driveway. The foliage
extends. A branch slaps back,
leaves an archipelago of blood
along my calf. Another, another,

I don’t know their names, just
pull with faith in the prior owner,
in her fertile excess that even my blunders
won’t undo. One white twig

feels hollow, comes loose in my hand,
but what of it was underground is red
as a crime, bent and beckoning.
The spring’s first accidental sweat

catches in the corners of my squint.
When I stand upright, survey
my labor, nothing looks better.

Photo by Viridi Green on Unsplash

i wish i prayed

hands in prayer
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Work Song
–Dawn Lundy Martin

She said, I wish I prayed, I would pray for you. And,

we all wanted a shape of prayer in our brains, taking over

instead of it chomping on itself. Stupid little elf. God has

never come to me. We surrender in the teeming utterance

of materials soaked with sentences already made in air

and by machines. The country says Freedom, crushed under

its own dream weight. I did not make up this song. Design

Within Reach is having a “Work from home sale.” The coming

apart, the giant laceration across the sky, we all feel it. Look

at the fire, look at it, like all the rage of all the smallest beings.

Photo by Amaury Gutierrez on Unsplash

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

Standard

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