Uses
– Ama Asantewa Diaka
He used “I love you”
as compensation
for all the ways
he failed to love her
She used “I love you”
as an antidote
to pause the rot
Uses
– Ama Asantewa Diaka
He used “I love you”
as compensation
for all the ways
he failed to love her
She used “I love you”
as an antidote
to pause the rot
Museum of Obsolescence
–Tracy K. Smith
Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash
Bee on a Sill
–Tracy K. Smith
Photo by Michael Milverton on Unsplash
Logos
–Tracy K. Smith
Photo by Chetan Kolte on Unsplash
Snowdrops
–Sandra LimSpring 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 in the Median
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 bisonstampeding across the casino’s electric sign.
Pixilated, their clouded breath leads themagain 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 coyotewith 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 cheerfulbouncing in the slipstream of traffic—
I will believe anything they say.
Halfway
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.
Work without Hope
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
–Shayla Lawz
sometimes i want to ask the earth,
was it beautiful here
without usor 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 toohow 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 lightall this dreaming makes me wonder
if there’s always been a sky
this closein the air i am briefly starlit
& everything
is alive
What Bodies Move
–Kristene Kaye BrownLet the world come hungry at me.
Let the hours learn the tender curveof this neck. For so long I’ve wanted
to believe that I’m made of star stuff,
a glittering spigotfunneled from the blue spiraling arms
of our milky way.I hear
the clap of hands inside my chest.
I swallow. The bodysoftening against it. Who hasn’t wanted
to climb atop a roof and jump,
prove we too can come backlike 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 holeI 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 oxygenwe breathe
and the carbon in our skinfell 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