Dew On The Sea
Dew On the Sea by Claire Wahmanholm Star/savior is an infirm rhyme, but here:even the smallest music box will chimeif you place it all the way inside your ear.It’s like unfocusing your eyes to seethe nest snug within the burning wood;it’s like when the weather map pulses greenafter you look away from all that red;it’s like an artless belief in mercy(who is smarter and happier than youpermit yourself to be); it’s a near-dream.It all exists, but we may need to softenour bones to be born into it. Think dewon the sea, think hammered gold, think zygote.We may have to be both borne and boat. Poetry Home Art by Sean Riley
nothing is more sad than a waning moon
nothing is more sad than a waning moon by Sirka Elspass (transl. Anne-Sophie Balzer) nothing is more sad than a waning moon in dwindling candle light you write this to have a body means tremendous responsibility and no one is born knowing how it works but someone has hung a flyer on the crescent people are being sought after cats went missing if the apple is the embrace i am the worm eating it away Poetry Home Art by Mickey Haist Jr.
The Cabinda spouses
The Cabinda spouses by Landa wo O mbé – dé 1 returned to life!O kuet – dé 2 who will protect us from lightning!If the bottom of the sea is luminous.Why does your dark eye not reflect a light of love? 1 The night hunter that kills the game for Cabinda villagers but is killed each morning by his last prey.2 The wife – widow of Mbé – dé, interred every morning and disinterred every evening before the hunt. Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz
Kaddish 9
Kaddish 9 by Daniela Naomi Molnar below the quick ] [ surface currents of the mind muscular water moves ] [ undiluted sentience sole and fluid flow ] [ through everyone your tongue and your own wet breath ] [ already knows the nameless so it’s ok to disown the dead ] [ multiplication and to disregard the sad arithmetic ] [ of the bad and tired plan it’s ok, do not call the failure any name ] [ let your voice calve an inoculant omission ] [ of the self a home that’s all hinge ] [ let that zero loll ] [ open be muttered or sung ] [muttered or sung by the nameless one ] [ a sound thick as no mirror ] [ and dense as love’s ] [ black hole Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz
Kaddish 2
Please View this Poem on a Desktop Kaddish 2 by Daniela Naomi Molnar Let the rhyming, dying dream carve a tunnel in your trachea for breath then name Let the name be lush Let the name be rangy roaming past time to the source of language : a huddle of clean ash — the only promise time makes is to be ongoing an inconclusive light that cannot dim forming pink organs and petals green fuses and rot the metastasizing muscle the prison, the cell, the organelle the eight dollar cup of coffee the animal with no teeth in the hungry street the person with no love left in the desiccated valley the quake the rubble the flood the bone-dense shadows the traps sprung on sinew in inconclusive light god a fermata
I licked a leaf
I licked a leaf by Ron Antonucci You think me mad but licking a leaf is the least of it. I could tell you about the smell of a hummingbird’s wing. I could describe the sound of a rock as it cracks in its growing.I have witnessed the drip and streak of stars as they melt across the deep dark.I know the feel of water as it shudders into ice.I’ve heard the heartbeat of a caterpillar and listened to the soft cry and song of a dandelion as it goes from thick and yellow to whitened wisp.The pulse of pebbles on my palm… So, yeah: I’ve licked, I’ve tasted a leaf.Like all things within reach of the tongue, the hand and the heart, I can tell you that it is bitter, and it is sweet. Poetry Home Art by Alice Stone-Collins
And After, No One Lowered Their Flag
And After, No One Lowered Their Flag by Matthew Williams Shift in the viscera’s tectonics. Your body was to be as any other glass chapel in a fracturing land: code blue, cold lips the color of early light at dawn. Yes, it seems, even in death, some part of us succumbs to American pageantry: the way your hand clasped your heart as you collapsed to the hardwood. This is what I hold in mind in study of broken windows, the pattern of fracture, its dendritic limbs, the ever finer fingers reaching into what once, with clarity, held, as it passed, life. If you were here, I would ask, if you believed we can grasp, not the instance alone, but the act of shattering, if the hairline break in the ankle bone of some fossilized ungulate is an inscription of structure governing prey and predation, given as I am to seek the grand abstraction that poses as explanation, and thinking, if the dead know anything, they must know the sound of that biggest symphony, where we hear nothing but the pluck of one string. I am still listening to particulars still listening to the misdiagnosis, still seeing the orange morning opening like a crusted wound above the gas station and the man who watched me careen into the parking lot, roll down my window, and shout, Where is the hospital, in silence, turning his back. The owners, days before you died, asking you to just do your best to manage the finances from the ICU. The insurance adjuster’s dulcet hiss in the phone for days. You, twisting in the front seat of that red hatchback at a red light, a scream scoring your throat: a note sharper than a neighbor’s glare—another glass shard fallen from the broken anthem of this breaking place: the hometown, the county, the country where we found ourselves lost, when you said from the bedroom floor, hand over your heart: Don’t call an ambulance. I can’t afford an ambulance. Poetry Home Art by Morgan Auten-Smith
Away We Go
Away We Go by Claire Wahmanholm My question for love is this: how do I livethis way. Which way does the breath go. Which waythe blood as it runs. If I am alive and in love, how long will it hurt. Away we go, I say, climbing into the boat I did not make but every night am made to trust. I practice letting go: one beat, two beats, eighty per minute. Death has mowed more and more of the meadow. Each day I have fewer questions but they are all about pain, and what I would do to survive it. Or not, being un-brave. I wave and wave at my swimming daughter, whose stronger arms pull her from me into something stranger. Poetry Home Art by Cynthia Yatchman
Poetry_V16-1
Poetry Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Biological Speculation by Briel Felton PoemVolume 16.1 The More We Go The More We Don’t Know a Thing by Briel Felton PoemVolume 16.1 Away We Go by Claire Wahmanholm PoemVolume 16.1 Dew on the Sea by Claire Wahmanholm PoemVolume 16.1 The Cabinda Spouses by Landa Wo PoemVolume 16.1 And After, No One Lowered Their Flag by Matthew Williams PoemVolume 16.1 Afterbirth (fiction) by Rachel Stempel PoemVolume 16.1 I have two DNAs one belongs to my old by Roman Iorga PoemVolume 16.1 I Licked a Leaf by Ron Antonucci PoemVolume 16.1 i bleed for the first time on a toilet in Versailles by Sirka Elspass (translated by Anne-Sophie Balzer) PoemVolume 16.1 Nothing is more sad than a waning moon by Sirka Elspass (translated by Anne-Sophie Balzer) PoemVolume 16.1
Afterbirth (fiction)
Afterbirth (fiction) by Rachel Stempel Today’s horoscope told me it’s okay to lie.It’s not that I need permission but I need something. (Apparently this is self-sabotage. Or, at least, the reek of desperation.) Last night the way the hallway backlit her bedhead turned me—I don’t want to hurt you, really, but I don’t care if I do. (If you think you’re using me it won’t be that bad.) Sometimes God speaks to me through the Telehealth waiting room and the electric hum of computer silence is hymnal. Sometimes God speaks to me through the Telehealth waiting room and the message is swallowed with one-hundred silver bullets. I may’ve stolen the blueprint for my inner world but now it’s as mine as anyone’s: desert oasis, never enough money, every permutation of man. And all sound delivered through an unplugged box TV while someone who is not me (honorific) watches the longest baseball game of all time. (Someone who is not me is: a fire escape; the last yellow raincoat in Moscow; a pocket watch that fits so well in the mouth it settles into the palate—diagnostically speaking, a torus palatinus: still too much but at least hidden.) I am learning how wrong I am about everything and this is not how I wanted my year to start. It was only last month I finished taxonomizing the past year’s guilt so it looked like I’d some to show. (I’d gotten work-high in the spreadsheets and thought I must be getting better.) Tucked away in grooves (first, of your arms; then, of your chest), tonight I will sleep to be rutted the same. I do my best work before bird-dawn. My sex is goal-oriented but the best sex is a bad sentence: bleating and in need of a tourniquet. Naked, before a range of immutables can interrupt. The bouquet vending machine replaces your phonetics. We recite sound, slaughter—my shirt smells like it, like blood. I try to sound what out through cryptic fingerings on an invisible clarinet. You misread the notes. It’s natural to do so. Tell me something. Anything. I’m an excavator of meaning even in the smallest sample. Stop. I’ve no frame of reference for abundance. I’m so something, it’s impossible. (Or, at least, the reek of desperation.) Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz