Impermanence

Impermanence by Rebecca O’Bern The bay window opens to the north.It’s foggy out. I grab the gray, knittedsweater you bought my last birthday. The dead pull us apart so easilyas if we’re the ones wrapped in tight string,transmuted into nothing in the dark. I never used to believe in dying. No needwhen an afterlife awaits, a resurrectionsuspended in clouds and dust. Death, then, becomes a cold marathon,maybe a sprint, but somethingwith end. Something measured between existing and existing again,moon to next moon. Sleep and light.Your daughter picked up your ashes today, and as our fingertips touchedI was reminded again how I didn’t callenough before our last words diminished to smoke that always tastesof home, doesn’t it, wood stove burningevening timber. I wasn’t lying about the bay window, curtains drawnand tied back, staying put, can’t help ifsmoke plumes escape to the trees. Poetry Home Art by Keegan Baatz

Granite Basin

Granite Basin by Sofia Fall I used to run up there on Perseverance Trail when I lived in the apartment  on top of Gold Street where it met Basin  Road and all I had to do all day was   run or walk for miles in the rain and try to think of nothing except the false hellebore holding the droplets on its pleated leaves in perfect   viscous spheres. It was early in June. The only  person I knew in the whole drenched town had taught me that false hellebore  was poisonous to humans. It causes    the heart to slow, induces vertigo. I couldn’t  stop picturing how it would feel to chew the leaves to stringy pulp and watch  the mountains go blurry and succumb   to the mists that always enveloped them,  until it was all dizzy and invisible, me and the narrow trail above the gorge through the illuminated valley. I wanted   my heart to go so slow no creature  could discern its beating. Instead, I just kept running, tried to make it every day all the way to the washout without stopping,   ran faster so the hellebore became so smeared and green in my peripheral vision it glowed. I hated having to live every moment in real time, always   seeing with utter clarity. I hated letting every single leaf of that abundant verdant poison go. Only the bears ate it.  Poetry Home Art by Robin Young

Polishing

Polishing after Erica Reid I store recordings of birdsong on my phone.  I don’t know which birds, or how to learn,    or if it’s important to know. I need to earn prizes for things, always have. My mother   called me an apple polisher & she was right.  Who gives someone a dirty apple? I do    everything the right way, & when I can’t  I cry. On my phone you can listen to birds   from 2016, they may not even be alive anymore. Did they say all they needed   to say? Would they be proud of me,  replaying their chittering with a studious   expression? My mother was not proud  that I wanted the world to love me, that I    craved little head-pats from strangers & made homework for myself, then    completed it. Cemeteries are great places to overhear birds. Often I read wives’ names    from the headstones, in case no one else  has spoken them aloud in a while. I polish   the marble lambs on baby graves with my  sleeves. See how good I can be? See   what doesn’t bother me? It is time I knew these birds: where do they sleep, do they learn    faces, do they play favorites? Which ones drill holes, which ones like apples, which ones   are red? Word by word I’ll learn their language,  the kind things they might have said. Poetry Home Art by Marina Leigh

Falling

Falling by Ashley Hoiland Last night my daughter came to the side of the bed with a nightmare still in her eyelids. As I slid her body, like a velvet puppy, under the sheets next to me, she said the dream was about a war.  And I see how the soft folds of her six-year-old brain  could get there.    The next morning, she fell on her scooter and told me after, “I fell violently to the ground.” And is there another way to fall?    When the cottonwood tree in the backyard had to come down, five men pulling with a rope guided her body, 80 feet of it,  piece by piece, back to the earth.  The whole house shook when each section hit the sloping summer grass.    I wondered if the tree would forgive me when I took down the fence and allowed the men into the yard to take her.   And today, on a Wednesday morning,  when my sister and her daughter went to get the breakfast check at Denny’s, an older woman in a booth alone had already paid for it.   So, to my own daughter going forward, some falls are violent,  and sometimes a stranger catches you believing, at all cost, that you cannot be broken, not this time.  Poetry Home Art by Emily Rankin

Transfiguration

Transfiguration by James Engelhardt The lake is only a lake because water. Time filled the valley, drowned the stream,  covered the sedges charging up the tree line.   The lake is a lake because someone hauled rock  to some line they imagined, and now a boat glides  over that imagination past the lake’s edges and inlets.   A sandhill crane angles through, tracing a path cranes have traced for millions of years. And the day is gone like a breath. The forest, too.   The lake will drain. The boat will become earth—as will we, sitting in its belly,  watching what is strange become stranger. Poetry Home Art by Kathleen Frank

But, like when did you know?

But, like when did you know? by Neal Allen Shipley after torrin a. greathouse     i When I was thirteen, huddled around a portable DVD player with other guys from my class. No one else home, we still closed the door and blue light radiated from a screen hardly larger than a Gameboy. We felt dangerous, watching stolen porn: Ragged breathing. No talking. No eye contact. We didn’t do anything – just shifted, uncomfortable, legs twitching to the pulse of an unfamiliar dance. Later, they talked about imagining themselves the man. That’s when I knew there was something different: Knew I should have been watching the woman cupping her breasts, tossing her hair back, moaning; knew she was beautiful, if not a little campy; knew my legs should have twitched for her. The cameraman seemed to know: Zooming in close on the man’s face so I could watch the corner of his lips curl while he whispered, fuck yeah; panned down his chest and arms (tan, smooth, just a little muscle), and still downward across taut abs; only stopping to come even closer to his dick. I convinced myself I was only looking to compare my own. I watched straight porn for a long time; the women usually seemed to have a great time with men, who I told myself I wasn’t looking at when they whispered fuck yeah to me from the blue light. Later: Search terms like just men lead me to videos that made more sense.     ii When I was thirteen, huddled around a portable DVD player with other guys from my class. No one else home, we still closed the door and blue light radiated from a screen hardly larger than a Gameboy. We felt dangerous, watching stolen porn: Ragged breathing. No talking. No of an unfamiliar dance. Later, they talked about imagining themselves the man. That’s when I knew there was something different: Knew I should have been watching the woman cupping my legs should have twitched for her. The cameraman seemed to know: Zooming in close on the man’s face so I could watch the corner of his lips curl while he whispered, fuck yeah; panned down his chest and arms (tan, smooth, just a little muscle), and still downward across taut abs; only stopping to come even closer to his dick. I convinced myself I was only looking to compare my own. I watched straight porn for a long time; the women usually seemed to have a great time with men, who I told myself I wasn’t looking at when they whispered fuck yeah to me from the blue light. Later: Search terms like just men lead me to videos that made more sense.      iii When I was thirteen, huddled around a portable DVD player with other guys from my class. No one else home, we still closed the door and blue light radiated from a screen hardly larger I knew there was something different: Knew I should have been watching the woman cupping my legs should have twitched for her. The cameraman seemed to know: Zooming in close on the man’s face so I could watch the corner of his lips curl while he whispered, fuck yeah; abs; only stopping to come even closer to his dick. I convinced myself I was only looking from the blue light.     iv When I was thirteen, huddled around a portable DVD player with other guys from my class. No one else we still closed the door and blue radiated from a screen hardly something different: on the man’s face so I could watch the corner of his lips curl while he whispered, fuck yeah Poetry Home Art by Nick Hurlbut.

Picture of Us

Picture of Us by Joshua Kulseth for Rachel Anthony It was my birthday and we stood—you, beautiful, youthful; me, spectacled, unable for the life of me to comb my hair correctly—in the lobby of a hibachi steak house. After, I remember we were all over each other in the cramped cabin of my truck, in a field, on the deck of your pool. I don’t remember you crying, though maybe you wanted to. And I wasn’t helping, being myself. We’d weather a few more months’ worth of disasters together: I took and used what you gave and after, always remorse. Rinse, repeat. It’s funny now, sort of—nothing we could make last, at least. I keep the picture as a bookmark in Auden’s Collected Poems, placed now facing ‘Lullaby,’ so it’s like the two of us are reading poems together— lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm—Auden knew what affection costs us in headache, heartache; ours no different, so it’s fitting to leave us there, in his care. We do look happy, standing by the lobby couches, against each other bright in the camera flash, under lights, my class-ringed finger gripping your shoulder, yours my waist. The other day I saw you engaged, saw the picture of the two of you closer than us, faces touching, smiles honest. He looks nice, and you, happy. But between us: what we said, how we suffered, it’s all still there, though better as memory (we’d have been very unhappy together); better like this: posed always in affection, in the dark of leftover words Poetry Home Art by Ellen June Wright

Droughtgrief

Droughtgrief by Angela Williamson Everything exists within the skin on a hot night in a housepermeable by bugs, open windows begging for rain. Pricked by mosquito, I itch, specific to wrist or to the top of the thigh,or the heel of the hand, hard as armor. Nails scratch but cannot penetrate the subdermal deposit of poison. Sleep floats meas if in scalding water. Years ago, evenings like these, we chased the cows into the barn, made the water hot for their pre-milkwashing, set shoulder to flank and used rags to wipe clean the smooth skin of teat and udder. Fans sucked air out the widewindows but did not cool. Legs pasted with hay, thighs kissing, sweat dripping slick beneath my breasts, I learnedto discern relief in finger-wide strips of skin, ran hoses on my ankles, chilled my blood to pain. In the summerswithout rain the waiting hung over us like an old fashioned scythe nailed to a barn wall for nostalgia’s sake but no lessterrifying in its power to drop darkness. At stake? Bankruptcy, losing the whole damn farm. I longfor those days, when I lived without hesitation, knew the cows by touch, by shape, by the puff of breath or the swingof head, knew them by the heat they threw, the teat long or small, hot for a mouth or a hand. After milking, my fatherlay in the grass wiping away mosquitoes as swallows swooped over us, come down with the evening and what dew the skycould spare us, sipped up by the corn. I wait the sky’s cool hand to come rest on my forehead. I am lost, but for the drought,I am homeless, but for the heat and the solace of night come without rain. Poetry Home Art by Abby Miller

I’ve Lived So Long as a Dream Girl

I’ve Lived So Long as a Dream Girl by Jacklin Farley I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be real. Between meals, I pinch up belly fat, chubby bunny marshmallow bites sandwiched by my suspicious fingertips. I then attempt to conjure metabolism like a monsoon of China Slim Tea and sugar-free Haribo gummy bears through my blood. So it goes for those of us past the acceptable age for playing Bloody Mary and comparing thigh gaps at sleepovers. As I get older, I realize it takes velocity to exist in organic form, especially mine. One minute, my love language is sophisticated curve, peach slice dripping sweet with juice. The next, it’s an aspirin tablet dropped into a liter-sized Pepsi bottle with the cap screwed shut, transparent jugular bulging with carbonated excess seeking evaporative exodus in the snack aisle of your local Walgreens. It’s on the days I feel the emptiest that I want to explode the most, feel like I am running through a Reese’s peanut buttercup field encased by green Jell-O salad, that I want someone to unbuckle my ankle straps and call me “kitten” despite the fact I haven’t been teacup-sized since I was fourteen, despite my repressed scheming to eventually fit my fat ass back into Paris Hilton’s handbag. But if I can’t have hip dips, whipped cream on my titties, or armpit jiggle ready to embrace the lips of a saxophone player, do I even want this life? I must be eating more to have such energy to philosophize, to embrace living like a back alley duct tape Brazilian: throbbing and shameless, fleshy and blushed down to the bone in places no one else can see. It’s painful, but at least I can feel more than nerve damage in my hands, the urge to hold my coffee cup in a compactor-tight grip to register even a Celsius of warmth. Call it my own method for moderation, aftermath of disorder. Call it crème brûléeing the wound after it curdles. As long as you sing, paradox of my digestive tract. For I know one day I will cease to be cute. For all I know, today is that day pouring into my palms over my belt line, spilled pitcher of milkshake, too much love in my handles. The world can tell me I am too old to be silly or fat. It won’t stop me from molting, coming back in a different skin. For I think I am rather too young to be dead. Poetry Home Art by Winslow Schmelling

Missing You

Missing You by Dante Novario I ate the cat. It was the first Tuesdayof winter and I was missing you. Thought maybe the taste of your palm print could still be found as it slid down but I only coughed out hairballs for weeks. I opened the dusty closet, found your favorite scarf, hand-sewn sweaters, slurped them string by string but your scent wasn’t hiding in the arm holes or collar trims. I was afraid of my mouth, the way it wouldn’t stop speaking your name. I ate our words,the local dialect, our language of angels strippedof all definitions. Some things couldn’t be swallowed: the leftover slice of pecan pie, old photographs too sweet to eat, the starved future that we once feasted upon together. I started licking door framesand floorboard cracks, gnawing on scribbled notesthat carried sacred messages like Headed OutWe Needed Peaches I thought I’d die from hunger. Chewedthe walls of our once-home down to their bones, stood still in its empty lot trying to stop my stomach from spewing our life back up, knowing no one would want to bear witness to such a stunning mess. I wish I had eaten you when I had the chance, kept yousomewhere safe. Is it too lateto crawl into my open mouth, remind meof spring, of what it feels like to be full? Poetry Home Art by Michael Moreth