Poetry_V18-1
Poetry Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Curation bySarah Fawn Montgomery Poem Volume 18.1 Once again, a poem about [ ] by Sagirah Shahid Poem Volume 18.1 If something is missing, don’t mention it by Angie Macri Poem Volume 18.1 Anorexia byClaire Scott Poem Volume 17.0 Recycling byRebecca Danelly Poem Volume 18.1 UBER RIDE, RDU EDITION by Carol Everett Adams Poem Volume 18.1 Class Reunion, Homecoming by Cathy Allman Poem Volume 18.1 As to Wonder by Jacqueline Hughes Simon Poem Volume 17.0 On the day we meet let’s tell the bartender that we’re freshly divorced by Julia Rapp Poem Volume 18.1 Palouse Hills by Jeffrey Gray Poem Volume 18.1 Polishing byEric Reid Poem Volume 17.0 Falling by Ashley Mae Hoiland Poem Volume 17.0 Granite Basin by Sofia Fall Poem Volume 17.0 The Body Center byCindy Milwe Poem Volume 17.0 Droughtgrief byAngela Williamson Poem Volume 17.0 I’ve Lived So Long as a Dream Girl by Jacklin Farley Poem Volume 17.0 Transfiguration by James Engelhardt Poem Volume 17.0 Picture of Us by Joshua Kulseth Poem Volume 17.0 But, like when did you know? by.Neal Allen Shipley Poem Volume 17.0 How to Lament on Tuesday at a Coffee Shop at 16:23 PSTbyJarred Mercer Poem Volume 17.0 Missing You byDante Novario Poem Volume 17.0 Impermanence by Rebecca O’Bern Poem Volume 17.0 Contusion by Emma Galloway Stephens Poem Volume 17.0 Triptych: At the Message Therapy Clinic byJessica Poli Poem Volume 17.0 A Peach Tree by E.G. Reilly Poem Volume 17.0
Uber Ride, RDU Edition
Uber Ride, RDU Edition by Carol Everett Adams She’d no front teeth, but said more than any other Uber driver ever, asked me after every story, Does that make sense? Her eyes Ubering off the road as she checked mine in the rearview. We Ubered in the forests of her pitcherisk acres, Ubered on her many riding mowers, Ubered past the years her Pawpaw raised her up to hunt, so she’ll never go hungry, praise Trump, and good God, but our hearts hurt for the woman in the news who Ubered from the Blue Ridge Trail. But you know, her own cancer-passed brother once rented a convertible just so her niece and nephew could have something like a coaster ride. They perched on top of the back seat, arms up, flew and laughed and laughed, and Lord, even I could remember the sun that day, like I Ubered down someone else’s street, does that make sense? Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz
Class Reunion, Homecoming
CLASS REUNION, HOMECOMING by Cathy Allman “You sure take a lot of sunrise photos,” the gray-haired woman who used to be drill team captain tells me when I scroll through my iPhone library to show grandchildren photos. No matter how much cake, or punch, or how many balloons, if not for the yearbook senior snapshots on our name tags, I wouldn’t know anyone. Did I even really know them when we graduated together in 1975? Decades of separation reunited. Captain Carry sees my shot of the river iced over, snow frosting the bare trees. “We’re in the winter of our lives,” she proclaims and sips white wine from a plastic cup. “No, this is fall, maybe even Indian summer. Is the phrase ‘Indian summer’ politically incorrect?” Photos flicker almost like a movie until I find the new baby photo. I hold my granddaughter in the chosen frame. Her open baby eyes are locked with mine. I have some knowing glance of adoration that responds to her blank curiosity, almost an unspoken prophecy of love beyond the overlap of mortal time. Yes, the days are getting shorter, but my garden is full—some tomatoes still green, some red and ripe, some rotting on the vine. The boys of summer have finished their pennant race. The World Series is here. Football is robust and populated with Swifties. Anyway, I like winter. I don’t ski. I hate being cold, but when I go back home after this reunion, back north, I will again be transformed into a child when I watch snow fall. Landscapes draped in white-cold sparkle. Leafless, tired vistas brand-new when frozen. She says, “So cute” in response to the grandchild picture and shows me her own shared albums. So goes the evening while the DJ blasts oldies. Tomorrow, I’ll return to retired status. But at this dance I’m suspended in a snow day, some surprise reprieve from the anxiety of exams—the hidden relief from the blizzard of childhood. Poetry Home Art by Ashley Hoiland
Curation
Curation by Sarah Fawn Montgomery I’ve dusted the relics for display, careful to curate a collection of the self. Follow the docent past the great hall: weapons, splattered canvas, coins and ironic urinals, world leaders made of marble before entering an exhibit of my body and best mistakes—scars and sex with strangers, vertebra resisting alignment, spirit claiming indifferent cities. The cabinet of regret outsizes the case of joys but not the shelves of grief carefully catalogued— assault, sexual; disability, invisible; father, deceased; violence, domestic; womb, barren. An intern wipes clean the glass for zero dollars an hour though the gift shop sells my teeth, the brittle fingernails plucked after death for less than a bad cup of coffee. Preservation isn’t easy, so forgive the arbitrary arrangement of my underwear and grudges, resentments next to a broken childhood doll, private matters made public, persona a requirement for audience. I tried to present the story of my survival but museums only display what is already lost, curate what has ceased to exist. Fiction Home Art by Michael Walrond
Once again, a poem about [ ]
Once again, a poem about [ ] by Sagirah Shahid In this returning emergency, in this crisisI give you love poemscaught between my teeth. What’s new about the little liars our lives have become?I need you to taste this day with me,to live it out with gusto, even though we both knowwe’re going to die eventually. You can’t teach a poet new tricks.I lattice my fingers into yoursand let my eyes lap up the moonwith you by my side. We are both shiny and larger than lifeon the inside. We are both cratered and citylesson the inside. No one inhabits usexcept for the lightwhich we reflect backto the people who keepprecise distance. As if to avoidthe growing shadowwhich comes backas much as it leaves us. We are invisible now.We are visible. We are the smallestsliver of universe.We are almost whole. Fiction Home Art by Kelley Hudson
On the day we meet let’s tell the bartender that we’re freshly divorced
On the day we meet let’s tell the bartender that we’re freshly divorced. by Julia Rapp That we threw our rings in the Hudson River a moment ago.To celebrate, let’s drink alcohol that is the color of indoor pools.Tell me your last words. I will share the ways I have pierced myself.Let’s touch each other in a corner booth. Smash our bottles in the back alley.Enter a street where the people are fleas and the city is a wounded deer.It could have been our two-year anniversary, but I have been dead for years.We could start here, on a building that looks like a glass hive, and leap.No? Okay, let’s eat disappointing sushi on the hotel floor and keep talking.You want to live in a shade of purple that rolls along like a story without a plot.I want to live in a house made entirely of citrus, but San Francisco will do.Do I seem careless and radiant to you? I am trying to be a plot device.You tell me to stop kissing you like we’re married and I have just learnedthat you are dying. But darling, we are dying. So I must tell youthat I have lied— I do believe in that which endures. I (almost) do. Poetry Home Art by Mark Yale Harris
As to Wonder
Igneous lump.
If something is missing, don’t mention it,
If something is missing, don’t mention it, by Angie Macri husband, parent, job, mind, limb, businesses downtown, the lots where sidewalks led to deadends where nice old houses once had been. One hot night, two girls walked down one, then turned to look at the street as it must have been seen from the porch back then. Oh we shouldn’t do this, the older said, it feels strange, and so they didn’t again. Streetlights, headlights caught in the pebbles in the concrete like lights in animals’ eyes, in their eyes as they walked home. Permissible: to speak of rain so long gone fields burned where they stood around the town. Because all knew, rain would return, for sure, sooner or later. Poetry Home Art by
Anorexia
Anorexia by Claire Scott Bear with meI have been given muchbut received little steeped in refusalwhere blades of hungerkeep despair at bay concealing ringsof whorled memoriesmidnight hands insisting no mercy in my morning teanot noticing the warm rain floatingover fallow land not noticingthe piles of pineapples, of pearsof cheeses and chocolateson an empty plate Poetry Home Art by Lilith Smith
Palouse Hills, Near Pullman
Palouse Hills, Near Pullman by Jeffrey Gray Riding west on the bus from the dry land east of the mountains I knew I wouldn’t see you again for a year or more and out the window lay those hills two thousand years of silt blown down from the glaciers eroding pale buff but wintry I was seeing them for the first time and never would again never will with your death now so many years behind and no reason to go back to the cropped wheat or to your wish to be a meadow with that return cut off in your life’s own evening in those rooms in that town in that car and the death that you took— (though we say she took her life —) never leaves me not in the cells formed this morning nor those in the infant night where they foliate unsensed unseen. Poetry Home Art by Lilith Smith