poem

the pyramid scheme

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The Pyramid Scheme
–Rosa Alcalá

 

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

fire escape fantasy

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Fire Escape Fantasy
–Tracy K. Smith

Photo by Charles Postiaux on Unsplash

 

the ghost

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The Ghost
–Frank Bidart

You must not think that what I have
accomplished through you

could have been accomplished by any other means.

Each of us is to himself
indelible. I had to become that which could not

be, by time, from human memory, erased.

I had to burn my hungry, unappeasable
furious spirit

so inconsolably into you

you would without cease
write to bring me rest.

Bring us rest. Guilt is fecund. I knew

nothing I made
myself had enough steel in it to survive.

I tried: I made beautiful
paintings, beautiful poems. Fluff. Garbage.

The inextricability of love and hate?

If I had merely made you
love me you could not have saved me.

Photo by Yaoqi on Unsplash

Let’s Crawl Into That Photograph & Stay There for a While

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Let’s Crawl Into That Photograph & Stay There for a While

–Rachel McKibbens

A child came up to me in the park
and asked for a cigarette.
Her eyes were startled cats,
her voice, a chandelier.
I don’t smoke, I said.
She took a seat beside me
on the bench, resting her head
against my shoulder.
Her hair smelled like an old
dictionary cracked open
after rain. I want tenderness,
she said, as a row
of pigeons crashed
against the trees
like good china.

Photo by Tamara Menzi on Unsplash

evanescent

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Earth Evanescent
–Maxwell Anderson

If other planets dark as earth
About dim trembling stars
Carry frail freight of death and birth,
Wild love, and endless wars;

If from far, unseen motes in flight
Life look down questioning
This helpless passage through the night
Is a less lonely thing:

But if unchained through empty space
Drift only shell and fire
What seeks the beauty of this face,
What end has its desire?

A candle in a night of storms,
Blown back and choked with rain,
Holds longer than the mounting forms
That ride time’s hurricane.

Photo by Anandu Vinod on Unsplash

the hummingbird

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The Hummingbird
–Blas Falconer

A blur in the periphery,
like the mind if the mind

were airborne, a buzz among
leaf and orange blossom.

the long beak pressing quick
into flower after flower, high

on each sweet center, and 
each iridescent feather shines

hard— a thought, half-formed,
charged, a hum before it lights

on the branch—and you
see it clearly—dimmed, now,

small, no longer what it was.

frozen in

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Frozen In
–Annie Finch

Venice, December

Ours are the only mouths
to taste with this smothering slow
touch, and the only steps
to sink like bellsounds and cave
deep into the marble snow.Women who go to the window
to push their arms out to the snow
and then bring the shutters back in
follow us as we fall
past their eyes where the black night lives.We are snowflakes at last, as the thick
never locked, never closed doors
follow us through squares of light
their windows have left on the snow.
Once again, warmth that falls,
again, though our tracks fill and slow.

 

Photo by Raisa Milova on Unsplash

lonely humans

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The Lonely Humans
–Jennifer Chang

A type of hickory, it grows by water.
So are we fools to drive to the river
the day after our most savage storms
have finally stopped to see
a tree we’ve never seen before?
To hike in cold mud through a leafless forest,
to behold clearings now cluttered
by whatever fell last night—mostly oaks,
no hickory—to attend the mad performance
of a newly roaring current.
I do not want to call it singing,
the wounded poet’s head howling
downriver. Remember we scorned
his broken heart, broken rashly
by himself, some say, for wanting love
too soon. You say I am unfair, that too much
rain is what makes the river rush (there is no “we”
in what you say, dear): we hear it
as mythology. We hear it outside
ourselves, a surfeit of music quickening
wind against winter trees, branch-taps
I mistake for premonitions. Of what? That the tree
is here, ready to spring to life again. I am
unfair. I want to love honestly; I want love
honest. Every tree is the wrong tree.
This is the direction we get lost in.
Beech, sweetgum, more oak. But she
was impatient too, you say, it is possible
she willed him to look back. We do not love alone
is what I think you mean. When I walk behind you,
the back of your head is golden, ungovernable
light I cannot look away from. Is it love
that to follow you I find myself choosing
an unexpected path; should we find the tree,
will it be I who led us there or you? Long gone
are the leaves alternate, compounded, each
an arrow, the thrust of a green thought;
along the forest floor centuries crack and turn
to dust. We have children, grudges,
a Dionysian mortgage, habits
mostly bad, and yet every December
I imagine spring, our time past
and to come, how when you follow me
I track the blazes to reach the river, and often
I have to stop myself from looking back.
To stay together, look away, some god said.
Here in these trees, our voices have no
faces, we’ve walked like this for an eternity.

Photo by Victoria Palacios on Unsplash

ghosts are laughing

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The Ghosts are Laughing
–Rick Anderson

Within the bony armor
of this disordered mind
ticks a callous timepiece;
a ruthless agent of judgment
there to punish, to remind.
Like slowly dripping water,
its monotony is unrelenting,
straining the thin threads
suspending my desperation.
Its claw-like hands reach out,
slashing honed razors,
each tick slicing deeply
into my tenuous sanity.
Teetering over the edge,
I topple into affectless isolation
and the refuge of memory.
I try but can’t remember
that one last moment
of contented silence,
that perfect frame of
simple, sweet stillness.
And I can’t always discern
realities from fantasies,
or truths from imaginings,
inside my mental carnival.
Confused and perplexed,
I ask the questions aloud
but the ghosts only laugh.
They already know the things
I have yet to learn
in the hardest of ways.
Inevitably I will learn
—I am learning—
that being alone,
being lonely always,
being nothing forevermore
is a burden far greater
than I have ever known
and I cannot bear it.
So, like the ghosts before me,
I will dream of the Boatman
and passage into the void
to surrender myself
unto the Timekeeper
and beg him to stop the clock.

 

Photo by Moritz Kindler on Unsplash

forgotten portraits

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Forgotten Portraits
–Janine Solursh

Suddenly nobody knows where you are.
You’re just a memory,
an echo,
an idea thin as smoke.
Your last text, call, letter, Facebook post—
only footprints in the surf.
Your edges blur and you become
a friend’s story,
a lover’s history.
Initially, you beat against the panes in set-aside frames
begging to be taken out
and rolled into motion once more.
But after a second winter,
then a third, and fourth,
there comes something serene and warm
behind the haze that smokes the broken hourglass.
Something new
and just for you.
This world belongs to you and yours
and when you glance back and recall your life’s movement
with a sigh of days gone by,
you are irrevocably comforted
having become that final exhale
that hangs in the air after the passing.
You pose
and hold it.
We are all the dead.
I am not apart from you for long,
except for breath,
except for everything.

 

Photo by Lieselot. Dalle on Unsplash